The Bad Old Days

If it weren't for the fact that there's always a losing team, Shank would have nothing to write about.

Is that an evergreen comment or what? While this column's of better quality than his previous one, it's because Shank writes about a theme (losing / being terrible at something) that he's eminently qualified to write about:

Looking back at the bad old days of Washington baseball

WASHINGTON — The World Series this weekend returns to our nation’s capital for the first time since 1933. Like everything else in this town, it’s complicated.

Major League Baseball in Washington is a study in failure and unrequited love. This is a city that lost two big league franchises in a span of less than a dozen years, a city that suffered through 33 summers of Baseball Prohibition after the perennial basement-dwelling expansion Senators bolted for Texas in 1972.

The expansion Senators were a punch line when I grew up in Central Massachusetts in the 1960s. The old adage about the original Senators — Washington, first in war, first in peace, last in the American League — still applied to the 1960s version. We took comfort in this in Red Sox Nation. The Senators were just about the only team annually worse than the Young Yaz Red Sox.