Yes, There Was Baseball Before Frank Howard and Denny McLain

Despite most DC baseball fans contentions to the contrary--or at least based on their gauzed-over recollections--baseball did exist in DC before those God-awful teams of the '60s.

The Post runs a profile of William McCarty, who spent the 1930 and 1931 seasons as the team's mascot. In those days, it wasn't uncommon for teams to pick an actual person, usually a kid, and parade him around. The Yankees, for a time, used an actual hunchback.

Although the story is short on his anecdotes, it does describe how the care the team provided was able to make a pretty large difference in his life.

I'm tempted to make some sort of comment about how the Nats should run with the ball (to mix a metaphor) and adopt an Urchin-O'-The-Day. But that'd be crude. So I won't.