Table of Content

  • The 2022 Nationals’ unwelcome records

    Let us count the ways the Nationals of 2022 smashed a number of long-standing franchise and season records for futility. A 55-107 fifth-place finish, worst since Washington regained a team in 2005, can do that. The Nationals finished 46 games behind the Braves and Mets, who tied with 101 wins, and 14 games behind the… Read more

  • Who, if anyone, was the model for ‘Joe Hardy’?

    Joe Hardy was the fictional baseball star created by J. Douglass Wallop in his 1954 novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, adapted soon after for Broadway and film as Damn Yankees. Middle-aged Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd makes a deal with the devil to become a great player (Joe Hardy) and, he hopes,… Read more

  • Paolo Espino’s near-record innings pitched without a win

    When Paolo Espino took the mound to start the Nationals’ penultimate game of 2022, he was on the verge of becoming the pitcher who threw the most innings in a season without winning a game. In 18 previous starts, although his record was 0-8, he always had lasted at least four innings. Facing the Mets… Read more

  • All-Star Games in D.C.: 1937, 1956, 1962, 1969 and 2018

    During the depth of the Great Depression, with a quarter of the American workforce unemployed, baseball attendance had fallen by 40 percent. A World’s Fair was scheduled in Chicago in the summer of 1933, and the city’s mayor wanted a major sports event to accompany it. He asked the publisher of the Chicago Tribune for… Read more

  • 2022: A record 43 games without a starter winning

    Washington’s Tanner Rainey saved a 3-2 victory for Josiah Gray over the Phillies on July 6, 2022, in Philadelphia. As poorly as the Nats were playing, nobody could imagine then that it would be seven weeks – 43 games – before another Nationals’ starting pitcher would win a game. Victories by starters clearly are far… Read more

  • Ty Cobb’s last hit came at Griffith Stadium

    Connie Mack’s Athletics were battling the Yankees for the 1928 pennant when Philadelphia came into Washington for a double-header on September 3, 1928. Down 6-0 with two outs left in the first game, Mack sent up 41-year-old Ty Cobb as a pinch-hitter against Bump Hadley of the Senators. Cobb, in his second year playing for… Read more