Frederic J. Frommer is a reporter for the Associated Press in Washington and the author of four books on baseball. This article is adapted from his 2013 book, You Gotta Have Heart: A History of Washington Baseball from 1859 to the 2012 National League East Champions. Follow him @ffrommer.

After an uneven start, the Washington Nationals are finally starting to play like World Series contenders at the All-Star break. If they can pull it off, the Nats would be Washington’s first major league champions in 90 years. But back in 1924—unlike today—few expected that the Washington Senators could ever best the mightiest teams in baseball, the Yankees and Giants. And back then almost the entire country was pulling for the representatives of the nation’s capital—strange as that might sound today—to win it all.

“In America’s mind-set, it ranked as one of the great improbables,” the late Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich reflected in a column in 1994, like putting “a man on the moon.”


The Senators hadn’t done anything to distinguish themselves before the 1924 season. The previous year, Washington had been a sub-.500, fourth-place team, finishing 23½ games behind the first-place New York Yankees, who went to win the World Series against the New York Giants. In 1920s America, baseball was the only professional team sport that mattered, with pro football and basketball yet to take off. But baseball’s showcase event, the World Series, had become a parochial affair: 1923 was the third straight New York-New York Fall Classic.

The Yankees featured a powerhouse lineup led by Babe Ruth, who hit .393 in 1923 with 41 home runs, and three starting pitchers who won at least 19 games. The Senators had shown some promise in 1923, featuring five .300 hitters. But only one starting pitcher, Walter Johnson, had a winning record—and at 35, in his 17th season, the Big Train appeared to be slowing down, posting a so-so .3.48 ERA, one of his worst ever. In his first 10 seasons, Johnson had only once had an ERA over 2.00, and never over 3.00.

Like this year’s Nats, led by rookie manager Matt Williams, the 1924 Senators went with an untested skipper. Team owner Clark Griffith decided to shake things up by naming his 27-year-old second baseman, Bucky Harris, player-manager, in hopes of finally bringing a pennant to Washington. Sportswriters panned the move as “Griffith’s Folly,” but the owner saw something in his new manager more important than experience: “I’ve been watching him for five years, and he’s a tiger … 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.”

Another player in the league with plenty of “fighting spirit” was Ty Cobb, arguably the best in baseball history, by then at the end of his career as 37-year-old player-manager of the Detroit Tigers. Cobb, a notoriously dirty player who relished baiting opponents, taunted Harris with names such as “baby face” and “snookums.”

Harris’s son, Stanley Harris, told me a story about Cobb spiking young Senators third baseman Ossie Bluege in a game that season, angering Bucky Harris.“After that, every time Cobb would come to second base, with a double play possibility, dad would try to hit him in the head with the ball, and Cobb would try to spike him,” Stanley Harris, now 86, recalled with a laugh.

There were no hard feelings on Cobb’s part—at least years later, when he reflected on his one-time adversary: “He was my kind of ballplayer and we always played hard against each other—hard but always with respect.”

***

At the team’s spring training facility in Tampa, Florida, Griffith was one of the few people in baseball who predicted a successful year for the Senators: “Those boys are going to get somewhere this year.”

If the Senators— even then, their official name was the Nationals, and the two names were used interchangeably — were to upset the established order that season, it would be in tune with the times. The “Roaring 20s” was a decade of great cultural and political change, marked by Prohibition, speakeasies, the Charleston, jazz clubs and new-found freedom for many Americans who purchased cars for the first time. The decade began with women finally winning the right to vote.

President Calvin Coolidge preparing to throw out the ball for the opening game of the 1924 World Series between the Washington Senators and the New York Giants.

And Bucky Harris wasn’t the only young man entrusted with a lot of responsibility in 1924. That same year, J. Edgar Hoover, just 29, was named head of the FBI. Another man who had yet to reach his 30th birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald, began work on The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925.

It was also an era of exciting and legendary baseball players. In addition to Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb, the American League featured greats such as Tris Speaker, Al Simmons and Eddie Collins. In the National League, Rogers Hornsby hit .424 in 1924, and the pennant-winning Giants featured an astonishing six future Hall of Famer hitters: George Kelly, Frankie Frisch, Bill Terry, Travis Jackson, Ross Youngs and Hack Wilson.

Despite Griffith’s confidence in his new manager, after 50 games, the ’24 Senators were on pace for another ho-hum season, starting 24-26—nearly identical to this year’s Nats, who began 25-25. At roughly the one-third point of the season, the Senators sat in sixth place in the eight-team American League, 4½ games behind the first-place Yankees.

Then, as Babe Ruth would later recall in his autobiography, “Washington got hot quicker than almost any club I ever saw.” The Senators reeled off five straight wins, and then went to New York on June 23 to start a four-game series against the Yankees. Washington won all four to catapult into first place.

Eight thousand fans welcomed the team home upon its return to Union Station after the sweep. “Oh You Nationals!” the Washington Post exclaimed. “Washington fans for the first time in their lives will experience the thrill of seeing the home representatives take the field tomorrow afternoon as the official defender of first place.”

It wasn’t just Washingtonians who were excited about the Senators as they battled the Yankees and Tigers for the pennant. Fans across the country rooted for the young underdogs from the nation’s capital. Many hoped that Walter Johnson, a nice guy who had pitched many years for mostly bad Washington teams, would finally get a chance to play in a World Series in the twilight of his career.

“There is more genuine interest in him than there is in a presidential election,” Will Rogers wrote in a syndicated column titled, “Everybody Is Pulling for Walter.”

Johnson was putting together an outstanding bounce-back season. He went 23-7 with a 2.72 ERA in 1924, leading the league in ERA, strikeouts and shutouts, anchoring a pitching staff with the league’s best ERA. He even hit .283, with a .389 slugging percentage.

But on offense, Washington was truly David to New York’s Goliath.

Babe Ruth, at his prime at the age of 29, hit 46 home runs—more than double Washington’s entire total. He also paced the league with a .378 batting average, one of six regulars to hit over .290 in New York’s dangerous lineup. The team’s first baseman, Wally Pipp, led the league with 19 triples, in his last full season in New York. (The next year, he lost his starting job to young upstart Lou Gehrig.)

Washington’s hitting was more of a dead-ball offense, stressing getting on base and manufacturing runs, with a special emphasis on the hit-and-run. Only one player hit more than three home runs, outfielder Goose Goslin—who finished with 12 and led the league with 129 RBIs. But the lineup featured a trio of .300 hitters—Goslin (.344), Sam Rice (.334) and Joe Judge (.324)—and no regular batted below Harris’s .268.

On September 8, the Senators held a two-game lead over the Yankees but faced a formidable stretch drive: Washington’s final 20 games would all be on the road, including a four-city Western trip. (Back then the American League’s Western teams were Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis.) Luckily for the Senators, as that year’s sentimental national favorites, they didn’t face the usual road-field disadvantage.

Bucky Harris understood the dynamic and urged the team from Washington to be politic. “Let’s not make any enemies if we can help it,” he told his players. “Most of the western clubs would rather see us win the pennant than the Yankees. Let’s beat ’em, but treat ’em nice.”

Washington won nine of the 12 games on its western trip and went to Boston for a season-ending four-game series against the Red Sox, still clinging to a two-game lead over the Yankees.

As the victories piled up, the prospect of the team’s first pennant had Washington in a state of crazed excitement. Baseball in D.C. had become a “Disease in Epidemic Form,” screamed a headline in the September 20 Washington Evening Star.

Back in 1924, of course, fans couldn’t watch the games on TV, or check their cellphones for updates, but they did congregate outside the walls of office buildings and groceries to watch the scores posted by the half-inning.

With four games to go, the Yankees and Senators both began their season-ending series on Friday, September 26. Washington immediately heightened tensions by losing to Boston, 2-1, while New York hammered the Philadelphia Athletics, 7-1. Now Washington led by just one game with three to go.

Walter Johnson, pitcher for the Washington Senators. | Library of Congress

The Senators responded with a 7-5 victory the next day, which brought them tantalizingly close to their first pennant. Coupled with the Yankees’ 4-3 loss in Philadelphia, Washington now had a two-game lead with just two games to go. The phrase “magic number” had not yet been coined, but people still grasped the concept. The Senators needed just one victory or one Yankees loss to clinch the pennant. Meanwhile, in the National League, the New York Giants iced their fourth straight pennant by beating the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-1.

“There is no doubt as to the popularity of a Washington victory,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial. “All over the major league circuits the fans have been cheering for the Senators. In Boston the crowd stood up and cheered every time they scored.”

On Monday, September 29, the second-to-last game of the regular season, the Senators took an early 3-2 lead against the Red Sox but had to turn to reliever Firpo Marberry in the fourth inning. He pitched five straight scoreless innings, giving up only three hits, and then started the ninth inning with a 4-2 lead. With one out, the Red Sox brought the tying run to the plate, and Boston’s Denny Williams hit a ground ball to Harris at second base. The player-manager stepped on second base and threw to first for a pennant-clinching double play.

The celebration at Fenway Park must have made the Senators feel like they had been playing at home. Hundreds of fans rushed onto the field to mob the Senators, and thousands more cheered the team as it left the field. They tossed straw hats into the air and waved handkerchiefs, and some lifted Senators owner Griffith from his seat in the stands and ferried him down to the dugout. Griffith, Harris and Johnson received standing ovations.

The next day’s Boston Globe put the news on the front page, topped by a cartoon of a handsome Harris standing on top of the Capitol holding a pennant with the word “champions” on it, and tiny silhouetted fans jumping for joy. A smaller cartoon showed Boston fans surrounding Griffith, yelling, “Yea Griff.”

Meanwhile, back in Washington, thousands had congregated in the drenching rain to watch mechanical scoreboards register updates from Boston. When the final score was posted, fans threw umbrellas and hats in the air, shouting and dancing in celebration.

A great final stretch had helped carry the Senators over the finish line. Washington won 14 of 20 games on its season-ending road trip, and played at a .636 clip in the second half of the season, finishing with an overall winning percentage of .597.

In Philadelphia, rain washed out the scheduled Yankees-Athletics doubleheader, and the meaningless games were not made up. New York’s season was over. But having vanquished one New York team, Washington now had to take on another—the 10-time National League champion New York Giants.

“Naturally we are a happy lot, just like one big family, everybody tickled,” Griffith said, adding that the pennant vindicated his much-maligned decision to hire the young and unproven Harris as manager. “I knew he could do it and he did.”

For Harris, it was business as usual. Before leaving Boston to return to Washington, the player-manager told his players, “Winning the pennant means just another hard job for us, fellows, so after you land in Washington Wednesday get all the rest you can before reporting at the ball yard at one o’clock for practice.”

The next day’s Washington Evening Star ran a three-column cartoon featuring a smiling and celebrating Uncle Sam; the Washington Monument turned into semi-human form with outstretched arms, one hoisting a pennant; and even the Capitol Dome shaped like a baseball, with the bronze female statue on the top yelling, “Hooray!”

President Calvin Coolidge sent a telegram to Bucky Harris. “Heartiest congratulations to you and your team for your great work in bringing Washington its first pennant,” the president said. “We of Washington are proud of you and behind you. On to the world’s championship.”

Even Ty Cobb jumped on the bandwagon. “I didn’t win the pennant, but I had the consolation of kicking the Yankees out of the race, and I got quite a kick out of that,” he said, referring to Detroit’s three-game sweep of New York in the final weeks of the season. He said he was rooting for Washington to win the series. “They are imbued with the competitive spirit, and they’ll fight hard.”

On the train ride back to Washington from Boston, first baseman Joe Judge said the team tapped the national affection for inspiration. “We knew that the country wanted us to win, and that’s what helped to keep us fighting,” he said.

Two thousand fans camped out at Union Station to greet the Senators upon their return to Washington Wednesday morning, the day after the regular-season finale. In the afternoon, 100,000 people jammed Pennsylvania Avenue for a parade to celebrate the team’s first pennant. The self-importance that marked Washington was dropped for a day, as the Star described it: “This debonair old capital of the United States completely forgot to take itself seriously in its eagerness to give its conquerors a welcome befitting champions.”

Whistles, car horns and cheers punctured the air along the procession, which included mounted policeman, a U.S. Cavalry Band and red-coated members of the Washington Riding and Hunt Club. At the Ellipse, President Coolidge, joined on the stage by Bucky Harris and Walter Johnson, presented the player-manager with a “loving cup” as a gift. He also joked that now that the team had won the pennant, perhaps the city could actually get some work done. “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,” he said.

***

But now the World Series—and the formidable Giants—lay ahead. The New York team had a lineup boasting six hitters who hit .295 or higher, led by outfielder Ross Young’s .356. They also had a much more experienced manager, John McGraw, who had guided the Giants to 10 pennants, and still wore a suit and tie in the dugout.

A 1924 Washington Senators baseball game. | Library of Congress

Nonetheless the Senators remained the sentimental, if not odds-on, favorites. “Harris and his players are liked everywhere because they are young and dashing and enthusiastic,” The New York Times observed. “New York is hated because it has won too many pennants and possesses too much money and is too powerful.”

More than 150,000 fans tried to get tickets for the first two games at Griffith Stadium, which had been expanded to 36,000 seats to accommodate the World Series crowds. (The stadium, which was torn down in 1965, is on the site of what is now Howard University Hospital.) Prices ranged from a buck in the bleachers to six dollars for box seats. Some fans managed to gain admittance by securing jobs as peanut and soda vendors.

Hundreds of fans who couldn’t get into the ballpark paid fifty cents each to watch the first game from the tops of wooden houses surrounding the ballpark. Another 12,000 gathered outside the Washington Post and Evening Star buildings to watch the game recreated on scoreboards. New York City, always on the cutting edge, offered fans a chance to watch a reproduction of the game on a “Playograph,” a scoreboard-type device that showed the position of the ball as it made its way around a baseball diamond, as well as the base runners.

At Griffith Stadium, an army band warmed up the fans at the World Series opener with “Sidewalks of New York” and “Dixie.” The crowd included ordinary fans, alongside Cabinet members, congressmen, senators, foreign ambassadors and Coolidge. The president puffed on a cigar, sending smoke up that mingled with that of other fans’ cigars and cigarettes, forming a hazy cloud in the ballpark. Men were decked out in suits, ties, and fedoras, while women wore dresses and fur-collared coats. On the field, Senators players leaned out of the dugout with their front feet on the playing field and bats neatly laid out on the field in front of them.

The opening game pitching match-up featured the iconic Johnson, 36, against 32-year-old southpaw Art Nehf, who had won the clinching games in the 1921 and 1922 World Series against the Yankees. The Giants took a 2-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning, but the Senators tied it up, sending the crowd into a delirious uproar. The game had to be held up for several minutes as excited fans threw coats, hats, cushions and newspapers onto the field. A newspaper from the upper deck landed on Coolidge’s hat, knocking it off-kilter, and the president took the advice of his Secret Service agents and sat down.

In an era way before pitch counts, specialty relievers and closers, both starting pitchers continued on through extra innings. The Giants finally broke the tie with two runs in the top of the 12th. The Senators rallied for a run in the bottom of the frame but fell short. In 12 innings, Johnson had thrown 165 pitches, surrendered 14 hits, two homers and six walks, while striking out 12.

Washington evened the series the next day with a walk-off hit by shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, and the series shifted to the Giants ballpark at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan for the next three games. New York won game three, Washington took game four and Johnson took the mound for the pivotal fifth game. Washington was confident that with its ace pitching, it could take command of the series. A Johnson victory would send the series back to Washington with the Senators up three games to two. But once again, Johnson didn’t have his good stuff. The Giants hammered him for 13 hits and six runs (four earned) in eight innings, including four hits by 18-year-old Freddy Lindstrom, on their way to a 6-2 victory. A Washington castoff, Jack Bentley, outpitched the greatest pitcher of the era, and even smacked two hits off him, including a two-run homer.

Johnson said after the game he would likely retire. With no more starts scheduled in the series, it appeared as if one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history would go out a loser. Scribes from both cities bemoaned such an unfitting end to such a glorious career. The Times led its story the next day like an obituary: “Giant bats penned one of the saddest stories ever known to baseball yesterday. After the name of Walter Johnson they wrote ‘finis,’ for it was Johnson, before the second greatest crowd of the series, who tried again and failed again. When Johnson’s own world’s series finally came along he couldn’t win a single game… . Even for 52,000 New Yorkers it was a tragic affair and Johnson the most tragic figure that ever stalked through a world’s series.”

The Washington Post expresses a similar sentiment: “No sadder scene was ever presented in World Series annals than the one that was played before 50,000 spectators today.”

In the clubhouse, Johnson read telegraphs that had come in during the game wishing him success. “These telegrams make me feel worse about it than ever,” he said. “I’ve received wires from all over the world telling me how everyone was pulling for me to win, and I couldn’t come through for them. I wish I could have. It’s not very encouraging to know that I’ll finish up my career in the big leagues with two World Series defeats, but I don’t think I’ll come back next year.”

The Senators won the next game at Griffith Stadium, 2-1, behind Tom Zachary’s second series victory, setting up a seventh and deciding game, also in Washington. New York started Virgil Barnes, who had surrendered five runs in five innings as the starter in Game four. Washington gave Curly Ogden his first start of the series, but it was actually a ruse by Bucky Harris to get Bill Terry, the rookie Giants left-handed hitter, out of the game.

Terry had obliterated the Washington pitching staff for a .500 batting average through the first six games, but he didn’t hit left-handed pitchers well, and McGraw often sat him against southpaws. Harris decided to start the right-handed pitcher Ogden and then bring in a left-handed pitcher, George Mogridge, in the first inning, forcing McGraw to make a choice: leave Terry in to face a left-handed pitcher or take him out and have him unavailable for the reminder of the game.

Ogden, making his only World Series appearance, faced just two batters, striking out one and walking the other, before Harris made the switch to Mogridge, who got the final two outs. Terry was due to lead off the top of the second, and McGraw decided to leave him in the game, at least for a while. Harris’s gambit worked, as Terry went 0-for-2 before being lifted for a pinch hitter in the sixth inning. Harris also enjoyed success as a hitter, smoking a home run into the temporary bleachers in left field that had been installed for the series, to give Washington a 1-0 lead in the fourth inning. It was Harris’s second homer of the series, double his output the entire regular season.

But New York came storming back in the sixth. After the Giants tied the game on a sacrifice fly, Washington’s defense became unglued at the worst possible time. With runners at first and third, Travis Jackson hit a ground ball to Judge at first base, but he fumbled the ball for an error, allowing the go-ahead run to score. The next batter, Hank Gowdy, hit a ground ball to shortstop, and it looked like Washington would get out of the inning with a 6-4-3 double play. But the ball went through the legs of Ossie Bluege, normally a third baseman who was filling in for the injured Peckinpaugh. Now the Giants were up, 3-1.

Washington went down in order in the sixth inning and managed two hits in the seventh but could not score. In the bottom of the eighth inning, with the bases loaded and two out, Bucky Harris smacked a ground ball to third that proved to many that the Senators were a team of destiny—or at least a team with a friendly home infield. The ball took a bad hop past Freddy Lindstrom and sailed into left field, tying the score at 3.

The game was stopped for several minutes as Griffith Stadium convulsed in celebration. Confetti, thousands of pieces of ripped-up newspapers, hats and coats were thrown onto the field. Wild cheers were mixed in with the sounds of whistles, bells and horns.

The fans continued to cheer as the Senators took the field in the top of the ninth inning, because coming in to pitch one last time was Walter Johnson. He had a chance for redemption that no one could have predicted after his game five loss, but equally possible was that he’d lose again—and finish the series with an 0-3 record and go down in history as a World Series goat. After getting the first batter out, Johnson came dangerously close to losing his third World Series game, as Frisch tripled to deep center field, but Johnson was able to wriggle out of the jam.

In the bottom of the inning, Washington also got a man to third base with one out. But Ralph Miller grounded into a rally-killing double play. So game seven would end just as the opening game had—in extra innings at Griffith Stadium.

Johnson had his good stuff, but he continued to get into trouble, allowing the leadoff man to reach in the 10th, 11th and 12th innings, escaping unscathed each time.

With one out in the bottom of the 12th, Washington catcher Muddy Ruel popped a foul behind home plate, and it looked like the Senators would go quietly. But catcher Hank Gowdy tripped over his own mask, which he had thrown to the ground to get a view of the ball, and Ruel had another shot. He took advantage, lining a double past third base. Harris let Walter Johnson bat for himself, and he reached first on an error by shortstop Travis Jackson. Ruel stayed put at second base.

Washington had had good luck with the area around third base back in the eighth inning, when Harris’s bad-hop single tied the game. Why not take a shot at the same neighborhood? McNeely did just that, grounding a ball to third, and, incredibly, the ball took another bad bounce and skipped over third baseman Lindstrom’s head. Ruel chugged home with the winning run at 5:04 p.m., without drawing a throw.

Fans jumped onto the field and danced on the tops of the dugouts, while police came to rescue players from the masses. The fans surrounded McNeely before he even reached first base, and his shirt was torn by the time he got to the dugout. “He was thumped and pummeled and hugged and reached the bench a very crushed young man,” The New York Times wrote.

Legendary sportswriter Fred Lieb observed, “Perhaps the millions of fans pulling for Washington to win its first World Series championship influenced the usually fickle goddess of luck to give a little lift to the gallant Nationals.”

Meanwhile in the clubhouse, Johnson told a reporter, “I’m the happiest man in the world, the happiest man in the world. Tell everybody I’m tickled to death and anything else along the same line you can think of.”

Harris said he believed in his aging ace all along. “Walter was my best bet,” he said. “That’s why I put him in. Anyone who thought Walter was through was a fool. I knew he was all right.” Harris said he also had visions of the game ending in a tie, because “I knew absolutely that they couldn’t score on Walter if we played all night, and we didn’t seem to be able to get the breaks.”

Harris’s son, Stanley, told me that his father rarely talked about that season. “He was a very unusual guy,” said Stanley Harris, who went on to become a U.S. attorney and federal judge in Washington. “He just figured he was Mr. Anybody. He just had a different job than other people. He was incredibly self-effacing, and never full of himself. Which is remarkable, considering it was pretty heady stuff being a player-manager at age 27, for a team that wins the World Series.”

The Giants’ losing pitcher, Jack Bentley, who had defeated Johnson in game five, suggested there may have been a higher power at work in the final game. “The good Lord just couldn’t bear to see a fine fellow like Walter Johnson lose again,” he said.

Fans celebrated well past midnight, honking horns, blasting sirens, blowing whistles and shaking rattles. Cars on Pennsylvania Avenue were forced to drive on streetcar tracks as thousands of fans jammed the street. People threw torn-up newspapers from office buildings.

In a syndicated column, Giants manager John McGraw conceded that Washington winning the series was the “greatest thing that could have happened to baseball. It was a popular victory.”