BBBLEACHER BOUND

Nationals Park History: From the Senators to the 2019 World Series

The quick read

Nationals Park opened in 2008 on land that was mostly surface parking, for a franchise that had arrived from Montreal three years earlier, in a city that had gone 33 seasons without a big-league team. Eleven years later the Nationals won the World Series. It was Washington’s first title since the 1924 Senators, and the team clinched it in the only Series ever played where the road team won every game. The whole arc, the wait and the payoff, is told by three bronze statues before you even reach the turnstiles.

Three statues at the Home Plate Gate

Walter Johnson, Josh Gibson, Frank Howard. The bronzes were unveiled in 2009 and moved from the center-field plaza to the Home Plate Gate in 2015, and between them they cover everything DC baseball was before the Nationals existed.

Johnson was the ace of the 1924 Senators, the champions Washington would spend the next 95 years trying to match. Gibson played for the Homestead Grays, who played at Griffith Stadium alongside the Senators; his statue ties this park to the Negro League greatness that ran through DC. Howard was the slugger on the expansion Senators, the second team Washington got and lost.

Both losses stung. The original Senators left for Minnesota after the 1960 season and became the Twins. The expansion club that replaced them left for Texas after 1971 and became the Rangers. Then nothing. From 1972 through 2004, 33 straight seasons, the capital of the United States had no major-league baseball.

The Expos years

The franchise itself was born somewhere else. Montreal got the Expos in the 1969 expansion, and the team played first at Jarry Park, then at Olympic Stadium. The 1994 strike wiped out the season while the best team in Expos history was playing it, and the franchise never got back to that height.

A decade of decline later, on September 29, 2004, MLB announced the Expos were moving to Washington. The owners approved the relocation 28-1. The lone no vote came from the Baltimore Orioles.

Three seasons at RFK

The renamed Nationals spent 2005 through 2007 at RFK Stadium while the new park went up on the Anacostia. The first home win came on April 14, 2005, against Arizona, in front of a city that had waited 33 years to see one. That same year the team drafted Ryan Zimmerman fourth overall. He would play his whole career in Washington and earn the nickname Mr. National, and he shows up again in this story at the exact right moments.

Opening night, March 30, 2008

The park opened with a one-game, nationally televised series against Atlanta on March 30, 2008. Bottom of the ninth, score tied, Zimmerman hit a walk-off home run. Nationals 3, Braves 2. You could not script a better first game, and nobody had to.

The building made news beyond the box score too. It was reported as the first LEED-certified major professional stadium in the country. And weeks after opening day, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass here, the park’s first non-baseball mega-event.

The contender years

The team grew into the building. In 2012 the Nationals won 98 games and gave DC its first postseason baseball since 1933. That same season the front office ended Stephen Strasburg’s year early on purpose, and the argument over the shutdown followed the team all the way into October, where the season died in Game 5 of the NLDS against St. Louis.

That set the template. Division titles in 2014, 2016, and 2017. Bryce Harper’s MVP season in 2015. The 2018 All-Star Game at the park. And four NLDS exits in six seasons, without a single postseason series win to show for any of it. Good team, great players, same ending every fall.

The 2019 World Series

Then came the year that broke the pattern by starting worse than any of them.

The 2019 Nationals were 19-31 in May. Not slumping, buried. What followed is the best comeback story this franchise has, and it ran through four straight October gut-checks.

In the wild-card game against Milwaukee, the season came down to an eighth-inning Juan Soto single, and Washington survived it. In the NLDS they drew a 106-win Dodgers team and took it to a fifth game in Los Angeles, where Howie Kendrick hit a grand slam in the tenth inning. The NLCS was almost gentle by comparison: a four-game sweep of St. Louis and the first pennant in Nationals history.

The World Series against Houston went seven games, and the road team won all seven. No Series had ever been played that way. Washington won Games 6 and 7 in Houston, with Kendrick again delivering the signature hit in Game 7, a home run off the right-field foul pole. Stephen Strasburg, the man at the center of the 2012 shutdown debate, was named Series MVP.

First title for DC since the 1924 Senators. Ninety-five years. The soundtrack of the whole run was Baby Shark, adopted from Gerardo Parra’s walk-up song, and the celebration ended with a parade down Constitution Avenue.

The teardown and the reset

The championship core did not stay together. At the 2021 trade deadline the Nationals sent Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers. In August 2022 they traded Juan Soto to San Diego in a deal that brought back James Wood, MacKenzie Gore, and CJ Abrams. The team retired Zimmerman’s No. 11 in 2022. The seasons that followed were lean, several of them in the 90-loss range, and the park spent those summers as a value ticket in a growing neighborhood.

2026 is the first year of a new regime. Paul Toboni runs baseball operations as president, Anirudh Kilambi is the general manager, and Blake Butera manages the club. All three were hired after the 2025 season, and they are among the youngest people in MLB holding those jobs. The young core built from those trades has the team at 46-43 through early July.