Britain’s King Charles III turned 75 in November 2023, after waiting nearly 74 of those years to take the throne. He and I have a couple of things in common. We each saw the Washington Senators play at D.C.’s Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, and we were born days apart on the same island nation.
Unlike me, Prince Charles sat in a field level, front-row, box seat when he visited RFK on July 20, 1970, the first and only time he attended a major league game. He did so in his first visit to America. The visit to the game was at the behest of David Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower’s son. who was interning with the Senators that season.
The crowd of about 8,500 politely applauded as the Prince of Wales arrived when the game was about to begin. The 21-year-old prince was accompanied by his 19-year-old sister, Princess Anne, and President Richard Nixon’s two daughters, Julie and Tricia. Julie was married to David Eisenhower. The game was played on a typically hot Saturday afternoon in D.C. with the temperature headed to the low 90s.
The British and American national anthems were played. The British royals stood silently for both, according to the Washington Post. Charles “appeared very studious throughout the game,” smiling “only when the Senators scored and when a fan made a clean catch of a high foul into the upper deck.”
As the game was the annual camera day, many in the crowd hoped to snap a picture of the prince, but were kept at a distance by the Secret Service. Several of the players, however, brought out their own cameras and, from the field, snapped clear shots of the British royalty.
The prince was seated next to Tricia, with whom he had danced three times the evening before at a White House dinner in his honor. “That was the time when they were trying to marry me off to Tricia Nixon,” Charles told CNN in 2021. “Quite amusing, I must say.”
Pitcher Tom Bradley, who grew up in the D.C. area and attended the University of Maryland in nearby College Park, was making his third start for the Angels since being recalled earlier in July. The presence of family and friends, not that of the prince, he said, made him a bit nervous. He left after four innings, down 2-0, having given up one earned run on three hits. But he walked three and threw a wild pitch.
His mound opponent was longtime Angels workhorse George Brunet, who threw a six-hit shutout in winning 4-0.
“Charles had great trouble understanding the concept of the foul ball,” the Washington Post reported the next day. “When the Senators’ Mike Epstein hit one into the stands in the first inning, the prince … could not understand why it was not a home run. He was quickly straightened out by the gestures of young Eisenhower, who pointed toward the two bright yellow foul poles.”
After an inning or so in the field-level box, the prince’s group moved to the enclosed club level before leaving the game at the end of the fifth to visit an art gallery.
Later that afternoon, Charles ended his three-day U.S. trip by talking with President Nixon for more than an hour at the White House. “Come back again, and maybe the Senators will win again,” Nixon reportedly told the prince.
Prince Charles grew up in England, of course. My parents took their 3-year-old son from Scotland to a new life in Washington, D.C., where I learned at a much earlier age than the prince about the strange and wonderful game of baseball.
This also appeared as the Dec. 9, 2023, post in Here’s the Pitch, the daily online newsletter of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America.
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