D.C. vs. N.Y. — a Forgotten Rivalry Revived?

If the Washington Nationals are able to become kings of the hill this year, they might have to pull off a New York-New York takedown – just as their forebears did nearly a century ago.

In 1924, the underdog Washington Senators unseated the defending American League champion New York Yankees to win their first pennant and then upset the New York Giants to claim Washington’s first and only World Series championship. This year, the roles of the two powerful cities are reversed. The Nationals, the preseason favorites to win the World Series, are facing a surprising challenge from the New York Mets in the National League East. Over in the American League, the Yankees are fighting for the lead in their division, meaning Washington might once again have to execute a New York two-step to bring a World Series title to the nation’s capital.

The Senators, also known as the Nationals, entered the ’24 season as long-shots for the pennant, if anyone even considered them contenders at all. Coming off a losing 1923 campaign in which they finished 23.5 games out of first place, the Senators in 1924 turned to their 27-year-old second baseman, Bucky Harris, who had no previous managerial experience, as their player-manager. Owner Clark Griffith was ahead of his time in going with an untested manager, and sportswriters panned the unconventional hire as “Griffith’s folly.”

“I’ve been watching him for five years, and he’s a tiger,” Griffith said of his new skipper. “Full of the type of fighting spirit that makes for success on the ball field, I believe Harris will instill the same spirit into his teammates.” The owner also predicted a good year for his team, which was coming off two straight losing seasons. “Those boys are going to get somewhere this year,” Griffith added.

The Yankees and Giants had combined to form a competition-stifling baseball duopoly in the early 1920s, matching up in the ’21, ’22 and ’23 World Series. So when the Senators made their run in 1924, fans across the country rooted on the underdogs from D.C.

“Harris and his players are liked everywhere because they are young and dashing and enthusiastic,” The New York Times commented. “New York is hated because it has won too many pennants and possesses too much money and is too powerful.”

The Yankees certainly were powerful rivals. In 1924, Babe Ruth was in peak form, leading the league in a host of categories, including batting average (.378), home runs (46), on-base percentage (.513) and slugging percentage (.739). Wally Pipp, in his last full season as starting first baseman before losing the gig to Lou Gehrig, hit .295 with 110 runs batted in and a league-best 19 triples. Herb Pennock paced the starting rotation with a 2.83 ERA and 21 victories, one of four Yankees pitchers to win at least 16 games.

The Senators couldn’t match New York’s firepower, hitting a league-low 22 home runs, less than half of Ruth’s total. Instead, Washington featured a small-ball offense, with every regular posting an on-base percentage of at least .344, led by outfielder Goose Goslin’s .421. The team led the American League in triples and finished second in stolen bases.

But Washington’s beating heart was pitcher Walter Johnson, who at 36 led the league in wins (23), winning percentage (.767), ERA (2.72), shutouts (six) and strikeouts (158). He also was the sentimental favorite of a team that captured the nation’s attention. In a syndicated column titled, “Everybody Is Pulling for Walter,” Will Rogers wrote, “There is more genuine interest in him than there is in a presidential election.” And the Senators’ march to the pennant indeed proved far more exciting than that year’s presidential race, in which President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, won 382 votes in the electoral college, trouncing Democrat John W. Davis (136 votes) and Progressive Robert La Follette (13 votes).

Like this year’s Nats, the Senators got off to a middling start, and roughly one-third into the season were just 24-26 and trailed the first-place Yankees by 4.5 games. But the team started pulling it together in June. As Ruth recalled in his autobiography, “Washington got hot quicker than almost any club I ever saw.”

The Senators battled the Yankees the entire season, finally clinching the pennant at Fenway Park on the second-to-last game of the season. In a scene unfathomable today, Red Sox fans stormed the field to celebrate their opponents’ pennant (and, not insignificantly, the Yankees’ elimination). The Senators had won 14 of 20 games on a season-ending road trip.

About 100,000 people swarmed Pennsylvania Avenue for a celebratory parade a couple of days later, and at the Ellipse, Coolidge presented Bucky Harris with a “loving cup” as a gift. The president also deadpanned that the team’s success had cut into government productivity: “When the entire population reached the point of requiring the game to be described play-by-play, I began to doubt whether the highest efficiency was being promoted.”

Next up was another powerhouse team, the Giants, led by legendary manager John McGraw, who had amassed 10 pennants and still wore a suit and tie in the dugout, a sharp contrast to Washington’s young rookie manager dressed in uniform and spikes. New York’s lineup featured several future Hall-of-Famers, including Frankie Frisch, Hack Wilson and Ross Youngs, who paced the team with a .356 batting average.

Washingtonians were confident that their star pitcher, Johnson, would neutralize New York’s high-revving offense. But the Giants beat Johnson, 4-3, in 12 innings, in the first game, with Johnson going the distance. They beat him again in Game Five, 6-2, and Johnson said he’d probably retire after the series. With no starts left, it looked like he’d go out as a two-time World Series loser.

But the Senators wound up turning to their ace once more – this time, in relief – in the seventh game of the series. After Washington rallied to tie the score in the bottom of the eighth inning, Harris summoned The Big Train to pitch the top of the ninth. And the Giants nearly pinned a third loss on him, as Frisch tripled to center field with one out, but Johnson escaped unscathed. The game went into extra innings, and Washington won the game on a bad-bounce single that hopped over the third baseman’s head in the 12th. Johnson got the win with four scoreless innings.

The Senators repeated as AL champs the next season, and although they lost the World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates, they seemed poised to surpass the Yankees as the elite team of the American League. Alas, it didn’t work out that way. New York reclaimed the pennant the next year, 1926, as Washington tumbled to fourth place. And by 1927, Johnson’s last season, the Yankees had become the famed “Murderers’ Row,” winning 110 games, with Ruth and Gehrig combining for 107 home runs. New York won its third straight pennant in 1928.

The Senators did win one more pennant, in 1933, with the Yankees finishing in second place. Washington lost the World Series to the Giants in a rematch of the ’24 Fall Classic. But after that, the exciting Washington-New York rivalry of the Roaring ‘20s and early Depression years fizzled into essentially a non-compete agreement. The Yankees piled up pennants by the bushels, while the Senators never returned to the World Series – and had only four more winning seasons before moving to Minnesota in 1961.

The disparity was so great that it inspired a novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, about a middle-aged Senators fan who sells his soul to the devil to lead his favorite team to a pennant – a story more well known as the Broadway musical, Damn Yankees.

Now, Washington is back among baseball’s elite, and is battling the Mets – the team that replaced the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers after they moved to California – for the division title. The Nats, after a slow start, have gotten hot, thanks to a starting rotation that probably surpasses the Johnson-anchored Washington teams of the mid-‘20s. With strong young starters of their own, the Mets look to be real contenders. The Yankees’ power, meanwhile, has helped catapult them to contention.

While no one will mistake the Mets and Yankees for New York’s mini-dynasties of the early ‘20s, the teams do have a decent shot at making the postseason. It’s been 91 years since Washington won a World Series championship. If the Nats are going to make a brand new start of it for Washington baseball, they may wind up having to do it in old New York.