1924 World Series title belongs to D.C., not Minnesota

On August 11, 2024, the Minnesota Twins commemorated the 1924 World Series victory of the Washington Senators. Why?  The casual fan may have forgotten that the Twins’ franchise began in D.C. in 1901 as the Washington Senators, an original member of the American League.

Calvin Griffith, who inherited control of the team from his uncle, Clark Griffith, moved the Senators to Minneapolis/St. Paul after the 1960 season. A few years later, he notoriously said that he did it because Minnesota had more white people than D.C..

So the Twins now have been in Minnesota longer than the franchise was in Washington. The Twins have reached the World Series three times, losing in 1965 before winning in 1987 and 1991. Minnesota has made the playoffs a dozen times. The Twins made it to the division series last season. Those are good things for Twins’ fans to celebrate.

Other than Walter Johnson’s pitching feats, the most often cited single-season franchise records (home runs, RBIs, batting average, on-base percentage) are held by members of the Twins, not the Senators. Hall-of-Fame slugger Harmon Killebrew would hold the Twins’ career HR and RBI record, even if you didn’t count those he had for Washington.

In 1961, Washington was left with a pitiful expansion team that had just one winning season (1969) before it was hijacked to Texas by Robert Short, another nefarious owner, after the 1971 season. From 1972 through 2004, D.C. was the largest metropolitan area that did not have a team. Many Washington fans reluctantly began to support the Baltimore Orioles, less than 40 miles away, a franchise whose own move from St. Louis in 1954 hurt attendance in D.C.

The Dodgers and Giants kept the names of the original Brooklyn and New York teams when they moved. So did the twice-moved Braves and (so far) the nomadic Athletics. That connection makes it far easier for those franchises to keep their ancient memories alive.

 The fact is that few younger fans know that the Twins were once the Senators, just as few Orioles’ fans know their team was once the Browns. The current Baltimore team does next to nothing to keep memories of the Browns alive. In any case, who would care? Better the Orioles commemorate Baltimore’s teams in the N.L. in the 1890s or the great International League teams of the 1920s.

The Washington Nationals regularly recognize the legacy of both Senators’ franchises. (The 1924 team was officially the Nationals, even though few people called them that.) Despite their many losing seasons, those teams are a large part of Washington’s baseball history, not that of Minnesota’s. The Minneapolis Millers and St. Paul Saints of the American Association are Minnesota’s 20th-century baseball history before the Twins.

Statues of Walter Johnson and Frank Howard stand outside Nationals Park in D.C.  In 2020, the Twins rightly removed a statue of Calvin Griffith from outside their ballpark.

Although longtime D.C. fans like me feel the pain of baseball fans in Montreal, we do not look to this franchise’s years in Canada as our team’s history. It belongs to Montreal.

Tim Raines, Andre Dawson, Gary Carter and Tim Wallach, among many others, will always be remembered fondly in Montreal, not in Washington. Similarly, Walter Johnson, Sam Rice, Goose Goslin and Mickey Vernon belong to D.C., not to the Twins.

So the Twins can go ahead and celebrate a century-old World Series, the only championship won by the original Senators. I doubt many Minnesota fans will care.

On September 13, 14 and 15, Nationals Park hosted the “1924 Centennial Weekend” with fireworks and promotional giveaways. That’s where the real celebration should be. The 1924 — and 2019 — World Series victories always will belong to Washington, D.C.

An earlier version of this appeared on May 18, 2024, on Here’s the Pitch, the daily newsletter of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America and on Substack. An updated version also appeared in the October 2024 edition of Squibber, the online newsletter of the Bob Davids chapter of SABR.