Frank Howard played in the major leagues for 16 years. He spent seven of them with the Los Angeles Dodgers and seven more with the Washington Senators. He had some great teammates along the way — Sandy Koufax, Jim Gilliam and Ken McMullen, among others.
But perhaps nobody was his teammate longer than his good friend and former colleague, Mike Goss, the well-known Washington liquor salesman who worked with Howard for more than a decade and remained friends up until the day Howard died, Monday at the age of 87.
“It’s a hard day,” Goss said about the loss of the Washington baseball legend and his running buddy.
Howard stood taller than his 6-foot-7-inch frame as a baseball icon in a town with a desolate baseball history and not much to celebrate for many years — losing and losing, not just baseball games, but entire teams.
Howard, in his seven years with the second coming of the Washington Senators in the 1960s, stood above the wasteland, a monument to the love of the game that withstood the hard times.
“I know it’s been written and said in many different ways, but the man’s heart far exceeded his great athletic talent,” Goss said. “His ability to deal with people was great. And he loved the game of baseball and felt fortunate to make a living doing it.”
Howard came to the Senators in a trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers in December 1964. His power exploded in Washington. He led the American League in home runs twice, with 44 in 1968 and 1970 (he would hit 48 in 1969, but finish behind Harmon Killebrew, who slugged 49). Those home run titles were his greatest source of pride.
“He gave everything away,” Goss said. “Jerseys, other stuff. Gave them to charity for fundraisers. But he kept his home run belts. He always signed baseballs, ‘Home Run Champion.’”
Howard gave of himself in every conversation he had with people who approached him, and given his size, he was easy to spot. “What a great storyteller,” Goss said. “He was never the star of the story, always a cast member. He could kiss the babies and talk to the grandmothers. Nobody was a stranger.”
“He would always put a “y” on somebody’s name,” Goss said. “Robby, Bobby, Tommy, Mikey, he would always talk to somebody like they were friends. And he would suffer the same questions over and over again and never make someone feel foolish.
“I played with him in golf tournaments, and he would always do this act,” Goss said. “Here he was 6-foot-7 and he would walk out on the course with a little kid’s golf club set. He would say, ‘Oh, God, look what the wife packed wrong again this week.’”
The two worked together for years promoting Jim Beam, the Kentucky bourbon. They met while Goss worked at the legendary Georgetown bar J Paul’s. “When I was tending bar at J Paul’s, he was working for Jim Beam,” Goss said. “Frank enjoyed a drink or two. The place was packed. We were three deep, and he comes over the top like Godzilla and says, ‘Don’t tip the bastard, he is stealing enough on his own.’”
When the two made appearances for Jim Beam, sometimes they would get a young bartender or manager who might not know who Howard was.
“Frank would say, ‘That’s OK. When you get home, tell your father. He’ll tell you who I am,’” Goss said.
He was “the Capital Punisher,” the giant of a man who hit more home runs than anyone in Washington baseball history until Nationals star Ryan Zimmerman passed him in 2017 with his 238th career home run.
Howard loved Zimmerman. But he loved ballplayers, period, and had a special view of them that served him well as a coach with five different teams — the Milwaukee Brewers, the Seattle Mariners, the Tampa Bay Rays, the New York Mets and the New York Yankees — from 1977 to 1999.
“You have to give a player the opportunity to go as far as his mind, his heart, his belly and his skills will take him,” he told me in our conversation on my “Cigars & Curveballs” podcast. “You don’t criticize, you critique. This guy will fit here, this guy will fit there, this guy might surprise you because he is a very intelligent and fundamentally sound guy. He might give you a bigger impact on your club than you think he might.
“If I had a dime for every baseball I’ve thrown some young man over my lifetime that I knew wasn’t going to hit a .198 in the Florida State League, or if I had a dime for every baseball I hit some kid whose glove was made by U.S. Steel, clank, clank, I would be a well-to-do man,” Howard said. “The easiest thing to say is he can’t do it. Let’s give him an opportunity to do it.”
For a man who had so much raw athletic talent — he was an all-American in basketball at Ohio State in the late 1950s — to be so welcome to the possibilities of young ballplayers and their dreams speaks to the big heart that Goss saw on the streets, where Frank Howard was anything but a punisher.
You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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