Capital Sporting Grounds
by Brett L Abrams
Summary
Politics touch everything in Washington, D.C., even baseball fields and football stadiums. The recently-completed Washington Nationals stadium spurred opponents to hold protests over the waste of taxpayer money, while the Mayor and others rallied supporters with the promise of economic development generated by the stadium. This promise of economic development, land swaps, closed-door deals and money maneuvers are nothing new.
In Brett L. Abrams’ book, Capital Sporting Grounds, he captures the wild history of proposed and completed stadiums and ballparks in the nation’s capital in the past one hundred plus years. As in any game, some players won while many others lost.
Excerpt
Most authors and scholars have placed the poor familial leadership of the baseball teams in Washington at the feet of Clark and Calvin Griffith, who owned the Washington Senators from the end of World War I until 1960. The pair are also the figures that the public remembers. However, the city has a long, rich experience with questionable family owners of their professional teams.
Robert C. Hewett assumed the presidency of a team in an upstart third league, the Union Association (UA) in 1884. A member of the Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias and Red Men, Robert Hewett ran a feed business on Seventh Street, NW. He ran away at fourteen with “but three nights’ schooling, on two of which the teacher was absent and the other the candle went out,” under his belt. After making his fortune selling grain during the Civil War, Hewett bought real estate and became a landlord.
Hewett had previous involvement with baseball teams in the District. He served as president for one of the city’s earliest professional teams. During that time he met the man who managed his UA team, Michael B. Scanlon. Irish-born, Scanlon settled in New York at age 11 and served with the union army for three years from 1863. He settled in Washington and began managing Washington’s semi-pro club, the Nationals in 1868 and assembled one of the most famous teams in the country. He started a pool hall business during the off season.
The Union Association Nationals rented the area where the U.S. Senate Parking Garage exists today. The owners filled in the “Capital Grounds” and erected a grandstand along C Street, NE at New Jersey Avenue that sat 3,500 people. The UA organizer Henry Lucas stacked his team with the best players. Lucas also manipulated the schedule to ensure that his St. Louis team started the season with a long winning streak. Without a pennant race attendance for the UA lagged. Hewett withdrew the Nationals from the league after receiving far less that their share of the gate receipts after games in St. Louis and Cincinnati.
Author's Biography
Brett L. Abrams is an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and author of “Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream.”