As Washington prepared for the civil war in 1859, some Washingtonians were making other plans. A group of mostly government clerks founded the Washington Base Ball Club and named it the Washington Nationals. Through tournaments, public relations efforts, newspaper coverage, and a “grand tour o the west,” the Nationals gave the public something to feel positive about during the 1860s and helped make baseball an important part of American identity.
In 1859, DC was a city on the verge of civil war, and the 1860 presidential election dominated the political stage and the nation’s newspapers. However, the election and sectional tensions were not the only topics covered, and, in 1859, reporters were increasingly covering New York’s baseball games and noting the creation of new teams. It was against this backdrop that a group of mostly federal government employees decided to follow their counterparts up north and form an organized baseball team–the Washington Nationals. A careful review of the activities of the Nationals during the key decade of the 1860s clearly illustrates that they were significant to the development of the national pastime.
President George W. Bush throws out the ceremonial first pitch when baseball returned to Washington, D.C. in 2005.
The Nationals adopted similar colors to 1968–1971 Senators adding gold accents to a tilted version of the expansion Senators cursive “W” logo.
In 2012, the Nationals won the NL East division championship and brought postseason baseball to Washington, D.C., for the first time in 79 years.
In 2014, the Nationals won their second NL East division championship in three years after defeating the Atlanta Braves, 3–0, on September 16, 2014. In the NLDS of the same year, the Nationals would lose to the San Francisco Giants, who would go on to win the World Series.
In 2019, the Washington Nationals won the Wild Card game, defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLDS, defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in the NL Championship Series, and then on October 30 won their first franchise World Series, defeating the American League champion Houston Astros in an historic matchup where neither team won a home game.
The last time Washington won a World Series was 1924, and the team at the time was the Washington Senators.
The history of baseball in the United States dates to the 18th century when boys and amateur enthusiasts played a baseball-like game by their own informal rules using homemade equipment. The popularity of the sport grew, and amateur men’s ball clubs were formed in the 1830–50s. Semi-professional baseball clubs followed in the 1860s, and the first professional leagues arrived in the post-American Civil War 1870s.
The earliest known mention of baseball in the US is either a 1786 diary entry by a Princeton student who describes playing “baste ball,” or a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts ordinance that barred the playing of baseball within 80 yards (73 m) of the town meeting house and its glass windows. Another early reference reports that base ball was regularly played on Saturdays in 1823 on the outskirts of New York City in an area that today is Greenwich Village. The Olympic Base Ball Club of Philadelphia was organized in 1833.
In 1903, the British-born sportswriter Henry Chadwick published an article speculating that baseball was derived from an English game called rounders, which Chadwick had played as a boy in England. Baseball executive Albert Spalding disagreed, asserting that the game was fundamentally American and had hatched on American soil. To settle the matter, the two men appointed a commission, headed by Abraham Mills, the fourth president of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. The commission, which also included six other sports executives, labored for three years, finally declaring that Abner Doubleday had invented the national pastime. Doubleday “…never knew that he had invented baseball. But 15 years after his death, he was anointed as the father of the game,” writes baseball historian John Thorn. The myth about Doubleday inventing the game of baseball actually came from a Colorado mining engineer who claimed to have been present at the moment of creation. The miner’s tale was never corroborated, nonetheless, the myth was born and persists to this day.
If you’re in Washington DC now, or will be prior to January 6, 2025, and are interested in baseball history, you really should take some time to visit the National Postal Museum’s baseball exhibit, ‘Baseball: America’s Home Run.’ For a taste of what you’ll find there, check out the video from Heritage Auctions below.
And if we peaked your interest and would like to go, here’s a link with all the information, and if you need a map, we’ve got that for you too:
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