The team's rosters included Baseball Hall of Fame members Goose Goslin, Sam Rice, Joe Cronin, Bucky Harris, Heinie Manush and one of the greatest players and pitchers of all time, Walter Johnson.

Joe Judge, Cecil Travis, Buddy Myer, Roy Sievers and Eddie Yost were other notable Senators players whose careers were spent in obscurity due to the team's lack of success.

The Senators began their history as a consistently losing team, at times so inept that San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charley Dryden famously joked, "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League,"[5] a play on the famous line in Henry Lee III's eulogy for President George Washington as "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen".

Raised in rural Kansas, Johnson was a tall, lanky man with long arms who, using a leisurely windup and unusual sidearm delivery, threw the ball faster than anyone had ever seen.

Johnson's breakout year was 1910, when he struck out 313 batters, posted an earned-run average of 1.36 and won 25 games for a losing ball club.

Over his 21-year Hall of Fame career, Johnson, nicknamed the "Big Train", won 417 games and struck out 3,508 batters, a major-league record that stood for more than 50 years.

Johnson won 33 games while teammate Bob Groom added another 24 wins to help the Senators finish the season in second place behind the Boston Red Sox.

[10] The Senators continued to perform respectably in 1913 with Johnson posting a career-high 35 victories, as the team once again finished in second place, this time to the Philadelphia Athletics.

Led by the hitting of Goose Goslin and Sam Rice, and a solid pitching staff headlined by the 36-year-old Johnson, the Senators captured their first American League pennant, two games ahead of Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees.

In the fall of 1953, the second major baseball franchise shift of the mid-20th century took place (after the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1952), with long suffering Baltimore civic and business interests purchasing the perennially cellar-dwelling St. Louis Browns from controversial but enterprising owner Bill Veeck and moving them 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Washington to the Chesapeake Bay port city.

The Senators were also the butt of many nationwide jokes during the 1950s, with the debut and running of a Broadway musical play in 1955 in New York City called "Damn Yankees" (based on an earlier best-selling novel and later movie in 1958), which followed a hapless elderly D.C. fan being given a "Faustian" or "devil's bargain," selling his soul to transform the team by becoming a young powerful new Senators player (played in the movie version by heart-throb leading-man actor Tab Hunter) and lead the lowly team to a pennant versus the Yankees.

He sold Griffith Stadium to the city of Washington and leased it back, leading to speculation that the team was planning to move, as the Boston Braves, St. Louis Browns and Philadelphia Athletics had done in the early 1950s, and the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers would do later in the decade.

Paul in the Upper Midwest state of Minnesota, a prolonged process that resulted in his rejecting the Twin Cities' first offer[17] before agreeing to relocate.

Stan CoveleskiJoe CroninEd Delahanty Rick FerrellLefty GomezGoose Goslin * Clark Griffith *Bucky Harris *Whitey HerzogWalter Johnson * Heinie Manush *Sam Rice *Al Simmons George SislerTris SpeakerEarly Wynn Cronin, Goslin, Griffith, Harris, Johnson, Killebrew and Wynn are listed on the Washington Hall of Stars display at Nationals Park (previously they were listed at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium).

The plot centers on Joe Boyd, a middle-aged real estate salesman and long-suffering fan of the Washington Senators baseball club.

As they performed even worse than the team they replaced, they were the subject of an updated joke: "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and still last in the American League."