The Nats and the Grays “Baseball has always been in David Hubler’s bones. A Bronx boy, he grew
up in 1950s in the shadow of Yankee Stadium and has lived and worked in the Washington area for much of his adult life.” Except for a few years in the mid-1920s, Washington’s major league baseball team could hardly be described as a powerhouse before, during, and especially after World War II. But whether they were called the Senators, the Nationals, or simply the Nats, the Washington franchise and its owner experienced the war from a front row box seat. The close relationship between the prairie-bred entrepreneur Clark Griffith, frequently known as the Old Fox, and the New York patrician President Franklin D. Roosevelt played an important, if often backstage role in decisions that affected the team but more importantly, the national pastime itself. Roosevelt’s White House door was usually open to the baseball executive because, as author Richard Goldstein writes in his book, Spartan Seasons, “The seventy-year-old owner of the Senators had built a friendly relation-ship with the president beginning in 1917 when, as the wartime assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt marched to the flagpole on the opening day of the baseball season
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