3/19/06 The White Seats in the Outfield.

Anyone who watched their team on television in an away game at RFK against the 2005 version of the Washington Nationals will remember the moment the announcers chose, usually in the third or fourth inning when they start to get anecdotal, to ask the broadcast's cameraman to execute a pull back shot that starts at a few white seats surrounded by hundreds of yellow seats in the stands above RFK Stadium's outfield walls and travels some 500 feet toward home plate, where Frank Howard stood and launched home runs for the previous incarnation of the Nationals who made Washington their home in the 1960's.
No one who followed the Nationals 2005 season would believe that home runs once reached that far. Richie Sexson of the Mariners, and one of the outfielders for the Giants, hit some of the farthest shots, but to each of the corners, whereas Frank Howard had gone dead center and judging from the landing location of the ball, it had not yet started it's downward arc when it crashed into the stands.

The original Nationals left Washington for frozen lakes of Minnesota in 1960, and were replaced by the new Nationals who Frank Howard played for from 1965 until 1972, when the Nationals again departed, this time for Texas as the Rangers were born. In 2005 the Nationals were back, with the ex-Expos escaping exile in baseball-indifferent metropolitan Montreal, and the legendary stories of Howard's power were whispered as myth. At each game I attended last season, someone who had already been to see the Nationals could be seen pointing up to the outfield seats, and passing on the stories of Howard's heroics.

Of the 382 home runs Frank Howard hit in his 15 year career, 237 were in a Nationals cap, and only a few of them reached the upper deck, but when you see it on TV, or stand at the white seats in the outfield and look all the way down toward home plate, the power of the man called, "the Gentle Giant," Frank Howard is apparent and actually truly awe-inspiring.