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Washington’s unlikely season is chronicled in Gary Sarnoff’s new book, “Team of Destiny: Walter Johnson, Clark Griffith, Bucky Harris, and the 1924 Washington Senators,” written by Dave Martinez It may offer Nationals fans a glimmer of hope as the coach’s team prepares. By the numbers, it will be another losing campaign. (The Nationals will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Senators’ 1924 championship in September.)
“This is a really great story about an underdog, a team that exceeded all expectations, a team that had a losing tradition before 1924 and wasn’t expected to do well that season,” Sarnoff said recently. said in a telephone interview. “And, of course, this is the story of Walter Johnson finally getting to pitch as a pitcher on a winning team.”
Sarnoff provides a detailed account of the Senators’ 1924 season, interweaving direct reports from various daily newspapers and several books, mixing information from game recaps with off-field events. It took the reader right into the middle of the pennant race. One of the first stories the Alexandria resident and Nationals season ticket holder tells is how the then-27-year-old Harris learned he had become Major League Baseball’s youngest manager. That’s what it is.
In 1924, two weeks before the Senators reported for spring training, Washington Herald sportswriter John Dugan surveyed D.C. baseball fans and found that enthusiasm for the club was “low.” It was reported that there was. The team, which had finished three games below .500 the previous year, hadn’t made any major changes to its roster and hadn’t had a manager since owner Clark Griffith fired Donnie Bush after the 1923 season. is not surprising.
On February 9, Harris, who had arrived early for work at Washington’s spring training facility in Tampa, received a telegram from George Preston Marshall, a D.C. businessman and baseball fan. The message from the future founder of Washington’s NFL franchise included just one word: “Congratulations.” Harris, who was the subject of trade rumors during the offseason, thought he would likely be traded to the defending World Series champion New York Yankees. He then received his second telegram from Griffith offering him a managerial position in the Senate. “I’ll take the job and win Washington’s first American League pennant,” Harris replied.
Sportswriters called this choice “Griffith’s Folly,” but their skepticism seemed justified when Washington fell to sixth place in the American League with a 24-26 record in mid-June. The Senators won nine straight games, beating the Yankees three times in a row at Yankee Stadium and moving to the top of the standings. President Coolidge reserved a box at Griffith Stadium for the next day’s doubleheader, and fans welcomed the team back from New York at Union Station.
Enthusiasm for the senator in Washington, D.C., was soaring. As Sarnoff details in his book, just before 11 p.m. on Aug. 1, a driver stopped at a gas station in the area and watched as a crowd rushed toward a delivery man carrying a stack of newspapers. I witnessed it. “What are they fighting for?” he asked. “This is an early edition of the Washington Post,” the station staff explained. “My understanding is that it’s all the Griff family’s fault.” During the pennant race and the Senators World Series, thousands of fans gathered outside the city’s newspaper building to watch the electronic billboards move. .
One of the most surprising things Sarnoff learned in his research for the book was that Johnson had planned for the 1924 season to be his last. The eventual Hall of Famer, who turned 36 in November, wrote a letter to Griffith in January informing him of his plans for retirement.
“He wanted to settle down in one place with his family,” Sarnoff said. Sarnoff’s first book, “The Wrecking Crew of ’33,” was about the Senators’ final American League pennant. “His plan was to go to California and buy a team in the Pacific Coast League and run and manage the team. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.”
Johnson went 23-7 with a 2.72 earned run average in 1924 and led the American League in strikeouts for the 12th time. His presence on the roster, and the fact that he never pitched in the postseason during his illustrious career, is the main reason fans in other cities and even players are rooting for Washington to win it all. It was one of the
Yankees slugger Babe Ruth said in July, “I’m rooting for the Yankees to win the pennant, and I think they will, but if they don’t win, there’s no club in the league I’d rather watch than Washington.” ” he said.
The Senators clinched the pennant in Boston in late September. Sarnoff described Johnson walking slowly from the bullpen to the clubhouse with tears in his eyes as the 15,000 fans at Fenway Park gave him a standing ovation after the game. Johnson appeared in three games in the 1924 World Series, pitching four scoreless innings in Game 7 and helping the Senators to a 12-inning, 4-3 victory over the heavily favored New York Giants. I got it.
Johnson, who led Washington to its second American League pennant in 1925 and pitched for two more years before retiring as a player in 1927, said, “Tell everyone everything that tickles you to death and everything you can think of.” Please,” he told reporters after winning. Just the title. “I can’t express my feelings in words right now, so I support everything you say.”
A century later, Sarnoff manages to capture the emotion of a great season in Team of Destiny, and it’s a fun read for anyone who likes underdog stories, especially D.C. baseball fans.
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