Two major-league teams failed in Washington, D.C., and both were called the Senators.

	Bill Wade, Post-Gazette The Homestead Grays have not been forgotten. Click photo for larger image.

If Washington becomes the new home of the Montreal Expos, a growing bloc of baseball fans and history buffs wants the club to be known by a different name -- the Grays, in honor of the Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues.

The Grays might have been the greatest team in cleats during the 1930s and '40s, though most Americans knew nothing about them. Barred from the major leagues because of their skin color, the Grays were embraced by two loyal fan bases, the original group in the Pittsburgh area and an even more rabid contingent in Washington.

During the final decade of their brief but glorious lifetime, the Grays actually played more of their home games in Washington than they did at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. They created a sensation in the nation's capital, outdrawing the American League Senators and winning eight Negro League championships in a nine-year span.

Competition among cities seeking the Expos is keen and will not be decided until the baseball owners' meeting in mid-August. Even so, people in and around the District of Columbia already are assuming victory and campaigning to rename the Expos the Washington Grays.

The effort was started by Christopher Rehling, an educator in Alexandria, Va. He became a fan of the Homestead Grays after seeing a small exhibit about the team at the Smithsonian Institution.

Rehling has created an Internet site -- rememberthegrays.org -- that contains a petition to lobby Major League Baseball and the ownership group of Washington's prospective team.

He said reviving the name Grays would be a smart move for baseball on two levels.

"It would be a fitting historical tribute and a good business decision. Baseball says it wants to reach out to minorities, and this a logical step in doing that. Plus, you'd see kids everywhere in Grays hats and jerseys."

Catcher Josh Gibson was one of the stars who played for the Homestead Grays. Click photo for larger image.

The Grays, in Rehling's view, did as much as anyone to pave the way for Jackie Robinson to desegregate the major leagues.

Robinson in 1947 became the first black player in the 20th century hired by a big-league team. A poised, college-educated 28-year-old, he was chosen by the Brooklyn Dodgers to break the color barrier that had excluded black superstars on teams such as the Grays and Kansas City Monarchs.

Robinson's success with the Dodgers helped spell the end of the Grays. The team died in 1950, as integration began putting the Negro Leagues out of business.

Much of Washington then forgot about the Grays.

"In a city filled with monuments, there is almost nothing to remind us that great black sluggers Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard packed Griffith Stadium and hit home runs at a pace unmatched by their white counterparts on the Washington Senators," said Brad Snyder, author of "Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball."

At their peak, the Grays were used to subsidize the all-white Senators.

Starting in 1939 and continuing through World War II, the Grays played at Griffith Stadium when the Senators were away. Thanks to the rent payments from the Grays, Senators owner Clark Griffith was able to turn a profit for his losing team.

The Grays owner, Cumberland W. Posey, was a savvy businessman who knew his team was a natural for Washington's ballpark, which was a neighbor to Howard University and was in easy range of the city's growing population of middle-class blacks.

The Grays would pack 32,000-seat Griffith Stadium when playing a top rival such as Kansas City. The Senators could not sell out their park, even when the New York Yankees came to town.

In fact, Griffith's Senators were responsible for one of Washington's most enduring self-deprecations -- "First in war, first in peace and last in the American League."

Griffith, a former big-league manager who was nicknamed "The Old Fox," knew the Grays were loaded with talent. He refused, though, to sign Gibson, Leonard, James "Cool Papa" Bell or any of the other Grays who might have turned his Senators into a winner. Instead, he was content to lease his ballpark to the Negro Leagues team, pocket the extra cash and keep baseball segregated.

His decision may have helped to kill major-league baseball in Washington.

Griffith did not hire a black player for the Senators until 1954, and he steadfastly refused to desegregate his minor-league teams. As Griffith continued to run his team as a segregated enterprise, Washington's population shifted to a black majority.

"There definitely was a backlash against the Senators," Snyder said in an interview last week. "They never in their entire history had a black superstar that the fans could rally around."

So Washington's new black majority stayed away from the Senators ballpark.

Struggling financially, the Senators moved Minnesota in 1960 and became the Twins.

A year later, baseball awarded Washington an expansion team, also called the Senators. It fared no better and relocated in 1972 to Arlington, Texas, becoming the Rangers.

Those with long memories say the Grays were everything the Senators were not -- charismatic, polished and consistently successful.

An American bootstrap story, the Grays began humbly in 1910 and rose to the top of their game.

Posey started the team with Homestead steelworkers. His club evolved into a powerful but little-known professional team. White reporters and editors ignored the Grays, even when they won 43 consecutive games in 1926. That Homestead team finished the season a staggering 102-6-6. The ties occurred because games ended at nightfall in that era before stadium lights.

Later, when the Grays were splitting their seasons between Pittsburgh and Washington, they featured the one-two punch of Gibson and Leonard, both of whom were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

Gibson moved from Georgia to Pittsburgh's North Side in 1924, when he was 12. A legend before he was 20, he hit the longest home runs in town occupied by major leaguers.

He played with the Grays, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and in the Mexican League, which capitalized on America's discrimination against black players. The Pirates considered signing Gibson in 1943, but decided they did not want racial controversy.

As it turned out, Gibson never got his chance in the major leagues. He died of a brain tumor at age 35, in January 1947. Robinson would desegregate the major leagues three months later.

Rob Ruck, a University of Pittsburgh historian who wrote "Sandlot Seasons," a book largely about the Grays, said most of his students have a passing familiarity with Gibson.

"The Negro Leagues have entered into popular culture," he said.

Less understood, Ruck said, is the way the Grays galvanized black people of diverse backgrounds.

"Even though the Grays were not indigenous to Washington the way they were to Pittsburgh, they had the same effect in each place," Ruck said. "Washington, like Pittsburgh, had black communities that were fractured by class, skin tone and the kind of job you held. The Grays were a unifier."

The team's presence is still felt in Western Pennsylvania. A historical marker to Gibson stands in the Hill District. The span leading into the team's hometown is the Homestead Grays Bridge.

Homestead Mayor Betty Esper said Grays gear remains a popular seller in town, and softball teams still carry the team's name.

Esper said she is optimistic that the movement in Washington will lift the Grays into the nation's consciousness.

"Any recognition for the Grays is overdue," she said.

Washington's toughest competitor to land the Expos might be in its own back yard. Loudoun County, Va., hopes to be awarded the team. Among the other contenders for the Expos are Norfolk, Va., and Las Vegas.

Snyder said he is not at all sure that Washington will get the team. But if it does, he believes Grays is the perfect name to start a new chapter in baseball history.

"A lot of people associate the Grays with Pittsburgh, and correctly so," he said. "But they were very much a part of Washington, too."