November 08, 2004
Let the Great Debate Begin!
Opening Statements
Moderator
Good evening, I'm Denny McLain, formerly of the Washington Senators and currently of the Michigan state penal system, and welcome to the D.C. Armory, site of this week's Great Name Debate 2004. Seated to my left in the Josh Gibson jersey is the estimable BallWonk, who will be debating on behalf of the name "Grays," winner of the name-the-team poll on his site. On my right, in the navy cap with the block red "W", is the equally estimable Mediocre Fred, who will be debating on behalf of the incumbent name, "Senators."
Our moderator
In a format agreed upon by both parties, each candidate will make a brief opening statement, followed by alternating posts once a day for the next six days, and concluding with closing statements on the final day. After that, we all plan to go down to Fado's and drink beers until we go numb.
Both candidates are free to use any supporting materials which they feel may aid them in making their cases. Name-calling, rumors, hearsay, innuendo, half-truths, untruths, groundless speculation and outright lies are both allowed and encouraged. OK, not so much lies. But this is Washington, and who can ever know what the truth is? Profanity, obscenity and racial epithets are outlawed, unless they're really funny.
This debate is being simulcast here and at BallWonk's site. Readers can vote for a winner during the debate and for the week following, by which time Emperor Selig and his dark minions will probably have chosen a completely different name anyway. Vote as often as you like, but no more than once per day.
By virute of a coin toss prior to the debate, Mediocre Fred has won the right to go first. Mr. Fred, please proceed.
Mediocre Fred, Speaking for the Senators
Thank you, Mr. BallWonk, for joining me here this evening in this noble attempt to inform and entertain the baseball public. Thank you also to the Armory for agreeing to host us, to Movable Type for making this broadcast possible, to the audience for tuning us in, and to Mr. McLain for agreeing to moderate. (And I must say, Denny, that orange jumpsuit looks quite slimming on you.)
Baseball is America's game. At its best, baseball embodies those qualities that are best about our country: its pastoral roots, its ethic of ordered striving toward a common goal, and its balance of democracy and meritocracy in its 8-team playoff field. (Those who would argue that the Yankees have subverted this particular virtue in recent years will find a sympathetic ear at this podium, but all the Yankees have done is try to buy success at any price. What could be more American than that?)
Fathers playing catch with sons, mothers playing catch with daughters, families going to minor-leagues parks on Saturday nights... baseball is timeless, woven into the fabric of our culture. And baseball does best when it evokes its past. Baseball has a rich, layered history, written and oral, unmatched by any other sport and rivaled by few institutions in our society. To evoke that history is to strum deeply-embedded chords in the human soul. And in no city in America is that truer than in Washington D.C. As Mayor Williams said at the press conference announcing baseball's return to this fair city, Washington's 33-year
hiatus from the game was merely the interruption of a conversation, a conversation that begins anew in 2005, at long last.
In the spirit of restarting the city's discourse with the game and the sport after these fallow decades, the team could do no better than to pick up where it left off. Not in the sense of a fan riot, a last-place team, or Denny McLain on the mound (no offense intended to our esteemed moderator), but by regaining the name by which our team was popularly known throughout its history in our town. I come before you tonight to ask that you re-elect the Senators as the name of Washington's new baseball team.
"Senators" is, of course, a two-term incumbent with decades of distinguished service in Washington, but it is far from the sort of incumbent that heads off to the legislature, gets drunk on power and privilege, forgets its roots, leaves its wife for a twenty-something intern and is eventually apprehended in a car with a stripper next to the Tidal Basin. No, if there's one phrase that can sum up Senators' term in office, it is "the people's choice."
It was the people's choice from the beginning. Washington's American League entry was born in 1901 carrying the official nickname of "Nationals," a bland and inoffensive name, the Joe Lieberman of monikers. Despite Major League Baseball's heavy-handed attempt to enforce the recognition of the team's offical name, the people and press opted for "Senators" practically from the beginning. And why not? It's uniquely Washington in a way that other names are not (no other American city houses the U.S. Senate, you may have noticed), it has a distinctive and pleasing sound (much better mouthfeel than "Nationals" or our current opponent, "Grays") and it provides headline writers with many more catchy possibilities ("Senators Censure Phils," "Senators Vote Down Braves," &c. ad nauseam).
Though MLB did not officially yield to the will of the people until the '50s, there was never any doubt what the fans, our team's constituents, wanted. They voted, time and again, every way they knew how, for Senators.
And it remains the people's choice today. Public-opinion polls routinely favor Senators for the new team's name by wide margins. This is a fact, much like the law of gravity only more interesting. And yet, when my estimable opponent assembled his name-the-team primary, the incumbent, the people's choice, was mysteriously excluded. How could this be? Was it an attack of amnesia? Did the bitch set us up? My opponent constructed a clever rationale, allegedly based on the Constitution, on which he based his decision to exclude Senators. If this wasn't an example of legislating from the bench, I don't know what is. But nevertheless, I think the good gentleman may have conveniently bypassed the true rationale. Did he not conclude that any name-the-team primary including Senators would be so one-sided as to make the whole concept of a primary seem derisory?
But what's done is done, and now his alleged "people's choice," Grays, will stand on the merits against the name that fans then and now clearly prefer. Now, Grays is a choice with a history of its own, and the Negro Leagues certainly deserve more recognition than they receive currently. In other circumstances, in other markets, Grays might be a perfectly worthy choice. But who would be fool enough, in a case where the will of the people is so emphatically expressed, to fly in the face of it and impose a name that smacks of political correctness?
Imagine with me, if you will, a young man who grew up on the Senators. He was born with the first-generation club, suffered the loss of a rising contender but picked up the second-generation club without a beat, then saw his club depart for the badlands of Texas without so much as a "thank you." He was, let's say, 18 when his Senators became the Rangers. He shed some tears, but he figured that baseball would never leave the nation's capital unrepresented by the nation's pastime for very long. So our young man waited. He was 21 when the Padres almost moved to D.C. He was 23 when President Ford tried and failed to persuade MLB to bring an expansion team here. He was 34 when Washington became the leader in an expansion drive that never happened. He was 38 when the capital lost out to Denver and Miami, and 42 when we lost to Phoenix and Tampa Bay (America's two largest and most vibrant retirement communities). When this year's happy news came, he'd just turned 51. He'd started to wonder if he'd die without seeing another major-league game in Washington. This is a man who's paid his dues. What name do you think he wants for his new team? Of course, he wants the only name he's ever known: Senators.
Major League Baseball needs to do more to acknowledge the Negro Leagues' legacy. But don't balance your historical deficits on Washington's back, MLB. Rather, yield to the will of the people. Bring back the historic choice. Bring back the people's choice. Bring back the right choice: Senators.
Thank you.
BallWonk, Speaking for the Grays
Good day, and thank you, Mr. Fred, for proposing this debate, and Mr. McLean, for hosting it.
With all due respect to Mr. McLean, he is the personification of why Senators is the wrong name for our team. Here is a pitcher who won 31 games for Detroit in 1968, a win total unmatched in the 36 seasons since. In his career, he won 131 games and lost only 91. Yet the one season he spent in a Washington Senators uniform, just three years after going 31-6, he won 10 and lost 22. Even Michael Dukakis had a better record than that.
For a brief, shining moment in the 1920s and 1930s, the Senators were a good ballclub. But since then, since Franklin Roosevelt's first administration, the Senators have always been Washington's lovable losers.
The thing about lovable loser is that they're, well, losers. Has any baseball fan ever watched his club finish in last place and say to himself, "Self, thank goodness we didn't make the playoffs; my October schedule is just too booked to watch more baseball." Or, "Self, as long as our team is named the Senators, who really wants to win games? Not me!"
No. No baseball fan has ever thought either of those things.
So why embrace a legacy of losing?
Look, BallWonk respects the memories of today's older fans, who were adolescents and young men and women back when the Senators played losing baseball in Washington. Why, I sometimes listen to the music of my own teenage years. But even though I might enjoy a nostalgic listen every now and then, I did grow up. Part of growing up is recognizing that no matter how much fun I had dancing to "Head to Toe" or "Lost in Emotion" at the junior high spring fling, Lisa Lisa & the Cult Jam were a terrible band.
As much as I cherish my memories of Lisa Lisa & the Cult Jam's two hits in 1987, I don't really want every song on the radio to sound like that today. Nor should anyone allow the fond memories of their youths to fool them into thinking that the Senators were any good. They were not. They were an embarrassment to baseball, a monumentally bad team, the very opposite of what we want our new franchise to be.
And anyway, the Constitution forbids us from using the Senators name. Despite Mr. Fred's valiant efforts to spin the issue, this new team is not a two-term incumbent. Washington has already had two Senators, and both are alive and well and still serving. The first now plays in the Minnesota Territories. BallWonk has met many of the Senators who moved to Minnesota, including Harmon "Killer" Killebrew, who is just about the nicest and most gracious famous person in the world. He brews a good root beer, too.
And likewise with Washington's second Senators, who now play in South Fork, Texas. Both teams still exist, and so this new team is not a continuation of the old ones. It would be a third Senators, something the Constitution expressly forbids in Article I, Section 3:
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State.
What could be more clear? It would take years to amend the Constitution to allow for a third Senators, but our team needs new uniforms by February.
Senators also fails the important question of trust. For 58 years, the team was named the Nats but called the Senators. Then for 14 years, the team was named the Senators but called the Nats. That's flip-flopping. We'll never know where our team stands - other than last in the division - if we adopt the Senators name.
So Senators brings a record of failure and betrayal, it would violate the Constitution, and it's an untrustworthy flip-flopper. What about the Grays?
There are almost too many good reasons to choose the Grays to count.
While they played in Washington, the Grays won 10 pennants, nine championships, and sent eight players to the Hall of Fame.
The Senators played in Washington for seven times as long but won only three pennants and one championship.
The Grays featured a veritable Who's Who of Negro League players and dominated the Negro Leagues more absolutely than any team has ever dominated its league. Not even Michael Jordan's Bulls were as supreme as the Grays were in Washington.
Since baseball started moving teams and expanding, clubs have adopted numerous new names. Most of the time, teams have chosen original names based on local associations or wildlife. But six squads have chosen new names based on previous club names. One, the Kansas City Royals, honored a Negro League team. Four, the Orioles, Padres, Angels, and Marlins, paid tribute to old minor-league teams. All of these teams have gone to the World Series, and all but the Padres have won the Series.
Only one team, the Washington Senators, was named after a big-league team. The expansion Senators never won a pennant, sent no players to the Hall of Fame, posted only one winning record in 11 years, and couldn't even draw a million fans that year.
History shows that when we name teams in honor of old Negro League or minor league squads, the new teams become popular winners. When we name teams after defunct major league squads, the new teams become unpopular losers. The baseball gods are clear and just in their judgment of new team names.
The choice in this debate could not be starker: Do we want to celebrate failure or success? Do we want to trust a flip-flopping loser or a consistent winner? Do we want to invoke the curse of the baseball gods or their blessing?
Do we want our new team to embarrass us with their losing ways or inspire us with their winning manner? Do we want to be the laughingstocks of the NL East or its masters?
In short, do we want to be the sad, sorry Senators or the great and glorious Grays?
BallWonk knows not what others may choose, but as for me, give me glory. Give me the Grays.
Thank you.
Posted by Fred at November 8, 2004 08:29 AM