Team UP Touch Base May Newsletter

After 33 years of no professional baseball in D.C., on September 29, 2004, Major League Baseball announced that the Expos would move from Montreal, Canada, to Washington, D.C., and change their name to the Washington Nationals.

Starting with the 2005 season, the Washington Nationals called RFK their home ballpark. While the team was playing in RFK Stadium, there were plans to build a new ballpark.

On May 4, 2006, just days after MLB named the Lerner family the team's new owners, ground was broken for a new ballpark. It took almost two years to build Nationals Park, which seats more than 41,000 fans. It is located less than two miles south of the U.S. Capitol Building.

The team's first game at Nationals Park was March 30, 2008. The Nationals won that game beating the Atlanta Braves 3-2 on a Ryan Zimmerman walk-off home run in the ninth inning. Nationals Park has been the home for many other very special memories, including playoff wins, no-hitters, and an All-Star Game, to name just a few.

To learn more about Nationals Park, tours are available on non-gamedays. More tour information is available here.

In the April Touch Base newsletter, we learned about the Homestead Grays, a successful black baseball team that won three Negro League World Series. We also learned about the legendary Andrew "Rube" Foster, the founder of the Negro National League. This month, we are showcasing Sam Lucy, who broke barriers in sports journalism.

African American sportswriters played an integral role in the success of the Negro leagues. Before television, fans who did not attend the games the day before would read about them in the next morning's newspapers. One writer in particular, Samuel Harold "Sam" Lucy, wrote continuously about the injustice of segregated D.C. and separated sports. A Washingtonian and former Howard University student, Lacy covered sports for the Washington Tribune and the Chicago Defender before taking a job at the Baltimore Afro-American.

Lacy constantly pushed for Senators' owner Clark Griffith to integrate Grays players into Major League Baseball. He encouraged others to not be satisfied with the segregated game. Lacy challenged racist conditions in MLB while highlighting the talent and successes of Negro League stars. He followed Jackie Robinson's career closely after he broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, often sharing a room with the baseball legend.

Although Lacy wrote about the success stories of other African Americans, he was a success story himself. In 1948, he became the first black member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. In 1997, he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame as the J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner for outstanding baseball writing.

DID YOU KNOW? Sam Lacy's love of sports started at a young age. Early in his life, he worked at Griffith Stadium selling peanuts and popcorn in the black seating section of the park.