FOR BASEBALL GAMES PLAYED IN DISTANT CITIES in the 1930s and 1940s, local baseball announcers would read the telegraph wire to find out what had happened on each play, add canned applause and the recorded sound of a bat, and broadcast games as if they were really watching the players. Arch McDonald, the Washington Senators’ broadcaster, was one of the best at this. But even he had trouble when the telegraph ticker failed. When it resumed, the announcer would have to catch up quickly, frequently by saying batters hit the first pitch and made three quick outs. McDonald was famously caught fabricating. He announced a three-pitch inning. One wondered how old Arch had gotten it so wrong when the Washington papers revealed the next day that infielder Sam Dente had set a Senators’ record by fouling off eight straight pitches. According to James C. Roberts in Hardball on the Hill, his absorbing account of baseball in the nation’s capital, something similar happened to another wire-reading announcer in Des Moines, Iowa. That announcer was "Dutch" Reagan, who in later years loved to reminisce about having invented a ten-second inning. Reagan announced Chicago Cubs games for Iowa stations from 1932 to 1937. He went on to other things, including playing pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander in the 1952 film The Winning Team and becoming president. But he always remained a Cubs fan—and his connection to Washington baseball was mostly that he was a baseball guy who wound up in Washington. Hardball on the Hill collects dozens of such nuggets of baseball history, old and new, and traces the relationships of those stories to Washington as a city, Congress as an institution, and the Senators as a ball club. James Roberts is the founder and president of Radio America, a news and talk network with over four hundred affiliates, and he has an eye and an ear for great Washington stories. Among his subjects are a legendary game between opposing units following the Battle of Spotsylvania, Virginia, in 1864, as Yankee soldiers brought the game south during the Civil War. You’ll find in Hardball on the Hill everything from the story of Abe Lincoln watching baseball played on the White House grounds, to Claire Schillace, a 1943 professional female ballplayer in the women’s league, who ended up teaching science to an Army brat in Germany named Norman Schwartzkopf. In his account of ballplayers who volunteered for service in World War II, Roberts provides a moving tribute to Jimmy Trimble, a graduate of St. Albans, who chose the Marines over the majors and died on Iwo Jima. Another who served, Roberts reports, was a minor-league pitcher named Bert Shepard. A fighter pilot, Shepard lost half his right leg to German antiaircraft fire—but still managed to pitch for the Washington Senators after the war, fitted with an artificial leg. Along the way, Roberts tells the history of the almost annual but always serious congressional game between Republicans and Democrats, and the story of Moe Berg, the catcher and spy of the 1930s. He recalls the congressional resolutions to absolve Shoeless Joe Jackson of the taint of the 1919 Black Sox, the still-living grandfather of Congressman J.D. Hayworth of Arizona who played with Ty Cobb, and just-retired Senator Connie Mack of Florida, whose grandfather, the baseball manager and owner Connie Mack, composed "The Sportsman’s Creed," which Congress should consider applying to its members. Then there’s the odyssey of Lacy Ellerbe, a Washington native, who played from 1937 to 1954 for teams in the Negro Leagues, and of Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Bunning, now a Republican senator from Kentucky, who helped establish the $1.5 billion players’ pension fund. Roberts touches on the B’nai B’rith Sports Hall of Fame and, of course, the Emil Verban Memorial Society—a collection of devout Cubs fans in Washington whose members have included Reagan, Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia, George Will, and Bud Selig. Roberts remembers Bob Wolff, the Senators’ talented play-by-play guy, who called the last half of Don Larsen’s perfect World Series game for the Mutual Network in 1956. And he tells the painful tale of Pete Rose Jr., whose twelve years of toil in various minor leagues brought him near Washington but not to the majors. On the other hand, it was a Washington attorney named John Dowd whose investigation led to the banishment of Pete Rose Sr. from baseball and thus consideration for the Hall of Fame. Harry Caray, the late announcer for the Cards and Cubs, makes a Washington appearance, too, captivating the town when he showed up for a Smithsonian seminar on the game’s greatest broadcasters. Finally, Roberts relates the sad saga of Washington’s professional ballclubs. The original team, the Washington Nationals, composed of government clerks, was chartered in 1859. (The nickname "Nats" stuck with the team even after they became the Senators.) After fits and starts, the first professional Senators left the Atlantic Association and joined the American League in 1901. On the arm of Walter Johnson, with a lifetime record of 417-279 and a career E.R.A. of 2.17, the Senators won the World Series in 1924 and the pennant in 1925. They represented the American League in the Series in 1933, losing to the New York Giants. Never again—from 1934 to 1961, when the original Nats left to become the Minnesota Twins, or during the tenure of the expansion Senators, who decamped to Texas to become the Rangers in 1971—did the Washington ball club win a division title. In the last twenty-five years of the team, they finished last eleven times, next to last five times, and had only two winning seasons. The Senators did have some heroes. Mickey Vernon, Washington’s perennial all-star, played an elegant first base and beat Ferris Fain for the American League batting title in 1953. Pitcher Early Wynn stayed for a while, Harmon Killebrew blasted homers for the old Senators, as did Frank Howard for the new. And if poor Bert Shepard isn’t the best measure of the Senators’ abilities, try an outfielder named Carlos Paula. He lived in pre-Castro Cuba and justified his three day tardiness at spring training in Florida on the "time difference" between Cuba and Florida. Or try Jimmy Piersall, who played for the Senators at the tail-end of his career and was thrown out of a game before the first pitch, arguing about something that had happened the night before. Or consider the Senators’ pitcher who threw down the baseball and took his wind-up with the rosin bag in his hand. He hadn’t noticed the difference. The stories of futility by the Senators could constitute a book of their own. Until 1961, Washington had an interesting ball yard. Griffith Stadium, named after the tightfisted Senators owner, was located at 7th and Boundary in the northwest quadrant of the city. (The location is now a parking lot for Howard University.) It featured its own Green Monster, a high right-field wall invitingly close. There was a beer garden in the left-field bleachers, 75 cents a seat, where if you possessed a draft card showing you were eighteen, you could buy beer, even if you were actually fourteen. Griffith Stadium was the venue for Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot home-run shot in 1953. All in all, James Roberts has put together a delightful collection of anecdotes, tales, and pictures of baseball in Washington. Hardball on the Hill is a book for every fan of the game, not just those who long for the return of Mickey Vernon and the Senators. James W. Haley Jr. is a circuit court judge in Virginia and still a Washington Senators fan.