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Insider | Short Hops | Love Letters
Early afternoon. The RFK Stadium gate swings open for major-league baseball in Washington, D.C. Heart thumping, Tommy McCraw passes through the players entrance, walks toward the clubhouse and -- and here's where this story splits and begins to follow parallel paths.
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| As a player, Tommy McCraw ended a D.C. era. As a hitting coach, he's helping start a new one. (Getty Images) |
"It's amazing," says McCraw, batting coach for the Washington Nationals, and with that, he's certainly in the correct D.C. Zip Code.
No other sport weaves together generations as tightly as the red stitching holds together a baseball, and as the Nationals add to the history books with the game's long-awaited return to our nation's capital Thursday, the game's master tailors are hard at it again, looping one more well-placed stitch through the years.
As the old Washington Senators closed out their term in RFK Stadium on Sept. 30, 1971, a 30-year-old veteran named Tommy McCraw played first base, lined the final hit in Senators history and recorded the final putout of an era.
As the new Washington Nationals open another chapter in RFK Stadium on April 14, 2005, a 64-year-old coach named Tommy McCraw will be in their dugout as the team's hitting instructor.
Amazing?
"Astounding," McCraw says. "People ask me, 'Did you ever think ... ?' Hell no, I didn't think I'd still be in baseball to make that circle. How do you think that? I can't think that. You can't think that. There's no way. It is going to be very emotional for me."
It is one of the neatest, latest twists in a game where the tie from one generation to its past is always shorter than it might appear.
And so it will be that while the old Senators might be frozen in time, one man who long ago wore the red cap with the pretzel-twist W will be proudly wearing it again Thursday night as that time melts away. And through him will be felt the presence of another man, an utterly important man who pulled the strings as manager when baseball last called Washington home.
"The tremendous lessons I got from Ted Williams, that's probably the reason why I'm a hitting coach today," McCraw says.
Isn't that something? You never know where the years will take you or what influences life will place into your path. One of baseball's greatest legends has been dead for nearly three years, remains unthinkably frozen in some new-age facility in Arizona, yet specks of his being continue to appear up and down the Nationals lineup, placed there with care by Tommy Lee McCraw.
McCraw spent eight big-league seasons attempting to figure out this crazy game. And then, just when it looked as if perhaps he never would, there he was one afternoon, sitting on Williams' bench in the summer of 1971 as the Senators were playing his former team, the Chicago White Sox.
"Knowing who Ted Williams was, knowing all about his great career, and then to play for him," McCraw says. "I don't know why he chose to do what he did with me.
"We were in Chicago playing the White Sox. Bart Johnson was pitching. I had been traded from the White Sox over the winter."
There were runners on first and second in the eighth inning of a close game, and Williams took a walk down the dugout, looking for a pinch-hitter. He spotted McCraw.
"Get your bat," Williams barked.
McCraw got his bat.
"Sit your ass down," Williams growled. "I'm not going to let that kid throw his fastball by you."
McCraw obediently sat down.
But the big, intimidating manager kept staring. He stood over McCraw, glowering.
"I oughta send your ass up and let him throw that fastball right by you," Williams growled again.
McCraw today: "Now I was mad. The umpire came over to the dugout and said he needed a hitter. So Ted says, 'Go up there so he can throw that fastball by you.'
"So I go up to the plate to hit, and now there's no way he was going to throw that fastball by me. He could have shot the ball out of a howitzer, he wasn't going to get it by me."
First pitch, McCraw belted a home run. Johnson walked a circle around the back of the mound, screaming the whole way as McCraw rounded the bases.
"He was cursing at me, saying, 'You old bastard!'" McCraw says. "And Ted was on top of the dugout steps when I got there. He hugged me. He told me, 'That's the way to hit a fastball!'"
Perhaps nothing could make the best hitter who ever lived more proud. A gruff and cranky manager had found a player he could place his faith in. An unsure veteran had found a legend's soft spot.
From that day forward, the two talked hitting every day. Most days it was for no more than five minutes. But McCraw couldn't soak up enough.
What McCraw had never realized was that hitting is as much mental as anything else. Williams preached to him the gospel of getting a good pitch to hit. Hear that, kid? Get a good pitch.
"Everybody back then always talked about raising your hands or lowering your hands," McCraw says. "He talked about looking for a good pitch to hit. That's the key. That turned things around for me. Seven years in the big leagues, I finally realized, shoot, look for a fastball.
"He made me understand that I'm in control of the at-bat, not the pitcher. My selection of the pitch is my choice. I'm not defending against what the pitcher might throw. It was beautiful."
A delicious new world suddenly was beckoning. McCraw went home to Los Angeles after the season and couldn't get Williams and his advice out of his mind.
"That winter, I said, 'If it's that simple, I'm going up every time and looking for fastballs, at least until I get two strikes," McCraw says. "I'd drive by my exit thinking about what he said."
Then McCraw could think some more as he doubled back to the exit he just missed.
"I just could not believe it was that simple," he says.
From that day on, first as a player and now as a coach, hitting to McGraw has been like literature to a professor. He studies it. He reads into it. He takes it to heart.
Williams? Were he still around today, the legend might not even recognize some things people will see Thursday night in RFK Stadium. For one thing, the Nationals have a batting coach. McCraw. Back then, the Senators had no batting coach. Who needed one? They had Williams.
A year before McCraw was dealt from the White Sox, Williams was presiding over the Senators' 1970 spring training camp in Pompano Beach, Fla., when a couple of his coaches, Nellie Fox and Joe Camacho, became entangled in a heated argument during fundamentals drills while practicing rundown plays.
Williams, who had been on a different part of the field working with the outfielders, came rushing over.
"What's up? What's up?" he demanded.
Camacho wanted to run the rundown play one way; Fox argued that they should do it a different way. Williams listened for a moment. He looked at them.
Then he boomed: "F--- it! Let's hit!"
To Williams, it usually was that simple. Was it his problem few others could figure things out?
McCraw only drifted into Williams' constellation for one season. The Senators left Washington following the summer of '71, and by 1972, the Texas Rangers traded McCraw to the Cleveland Indians, along with Roy Foster, for Ted Ford.
He went on to play only four more seasons, retiring following the '75 campaign at the age of 34. McCraw never did make any All-Star teams, never played in the postseason. He was more Mike Lum than Frank Howard.
Yet, like Williams, McCraw's fingerprints on baseball in Washington, D.C., are unmistakable. And looking back Thursday as the Nationals place their link inside that of the last Senators link and another generation makes the connection, it is eminently visible.
In the bottom of the eighth inning in that final game against the New York Yankees on Sept. 30, 1971, McCraw delivered an RBI single to give the Senators a 7-5 lead.
Then, in the top of the ninth, all hell broke loose.
The fans knew Senators owner Bob Short would move the team to Texas the following season, and though only 14,460 were in attendance, they became more boisterous as the game dragged on.
McCraw was playing first base in the ninth and, the way he tells it today, fans were throwing confetti onto the field -- ripped up copies of a Ted Williams book the Senators had given away that day, according to McCraw -- and the atmosphere became progressively uglier.
"The umpire behind me said, "Mac, if the fans come out of the stands, I'm out of here,'" McCraw says. "I said, 'If you leave, I'm with you -- I'll be in your back pocket!'"
Felipe Alou grounded out to start the ninth. Bobby Murcer bounced to pitcher Joe Grzenda for the second out. That's when some fans stormed onto the field, and that's when the players scooted and the umpires forfeited the game.
Draw a line from then to now, and it's McCraw who stretches from one end to the other, like the chalk that is laid from home plate to the right-field foul pole. Did he ever think? Hell, no, he didn't. Who would be that crazy?
Yet there it is, Williams touching McCraw at one end, McCraw reaching out and touching current Nationals such as Brad Wilkerson, Jose Vidro and Cristian Guzman at the other.
The gates of RFK Stadium swing open again. The baseball world will be watching, another president will throw out the first pitch and another crop of hopefuls will do what they can to make baseball history in a very special place.
And the beautiful thing is, all you need to do is glimpse at McCraw in the dugout at some point during the night for confirmation of what we always suspected anyway: The possibilities are endless.