Washington Nationals

The Washington Nationals of the 1870s were the first important baseball club in the capital city of the United States. They competed briefly in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (commonly referred to as the National Association), the first fully-professional sports league in baseball. The Nationals are considered a major-league team by those who count the National Association as a major league. Several other baseball clubs based in Washington, D.C., have also used the historic name Nationals. The team played their home games at the Nationals Grounds and the Olympics Grounds. They joined the National Association in 1872, playing 11 games that year, and 39 more games in 1873, although some sources recognize the 1873 team as a different franchise named the Washington Blue Legs. Following poor on-field results over that period, that team disbanded after the 1873 season. Another Nationals team was fielded with some of the same players for the 1875 season, but folded before the end of the season. Pre-NA The first team in Washington, the Potomac Club, was formed in the summer of 1859, and the Nationals were formed in November of the same year; both teams consisted mostly of government clerks. The two teams practiced in the backyard of the White House and played each other in the spring of 1860; the Nationals consistently lost to the superior Potomacs, but the latter disbanded on the outbreak of the Civil War while the Nationals kept playing, and by the end of the war were "solidly in the esteem of Washington fans, with the club's shortstop, slight, 23-year-old Arthur Pue Gorman, the darling of the spectators. Young Gorman quickly rose to stardom on the not-too-brilliant Nationals." (Gorman later became a U.S. Senator from Maryland and a power in the Democratic Party in the late 19th century). In the summer of 1865 the Nationals invited the Philadelphia Athletics and Brooklyn Atlantics, two of the major teams of the era, to Washington, losing to the former 87–12 and to the latter 34–19, before 6,000 spectators, including President Johnson. They "jealously guarded their amateur status by refusing all payments, including travel expenses."