A meeting of American League owners was held in Detroit on July 1st to discuss the situation. Short told reporters that selling the team was his first choice, but he was asking for $12 million, $3 million more than he paid for the team just three years earlier.
Virginia Senator William Spong wrote Nixon, asking him to meet with Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich to come up with a plan to block any potential move. The Post's sports editor, Marty Zad, asked the president to use "the power of the presidency" to help stop the move.
Ultimately, all hopes of a presidential intervention came to an end on September 7th. Herb Klein, White House director of communications, told Zad that it would be "inappropriate" for the president to get involved in a private financial matter.
The following week, Nixon made his first and only public remarks regarding the matter, saying that he would be "heartbroken" if the team were to move to Dallas.
Now assured that there would be no last minute Oval Office stay, Major League Baseball voted 10-2 to allow the team to relocate to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The two dissenting votes came from Brewers' owner Bud Selig and the Baltimore Orioles. This was surprising as Selig's team had moved from Seattle just a year earlier and the Orioles franchise would have greatly benefited from adding the city of Washington to its territorial claims.
The vote was announced on September 21st.
Nixon was right; he had no "legal" authority to stop the move. But in the rest of the world, away from the beltway, "moral" authority is something to be used when "legal" authority isn't available.
Nixon might have been able to apply enough pressure to force Short to sell the team to someone better able to run it. It wasn't the fault of the Senators' fans that Major League Baseball chose an underfunded owner with a history of moving professional sports franchises to run the team (Short owned the Minneapolis Lakers and moved them to Los Angeles in 1960).
Nixon's position as the leader of the free world was strong enough to scare the Russians and subdue the Egyptians, so it was strong enough to put a little scare into Bowie Kuhn and Bob Short.
Is it a coincidence that just a year after refusing to help the Senators, Richard Nixon's world came tumbling down around him?
Perhaps.
He spent the next two years fighting the media, the Democrats, and ultimately, his own political base until he was finally forced to resign the presidency in August of 1974.
Watergate was payback from the baseball gods.
In 1948, Harry Truman threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the Army if they didn't go back to work. He knew he couldn't legally do that, but that didn't stop him. Both sides caved and the workers returned to their trains.
Richard Nixon could have done the same thing.
Draft Bob Short. Draft Bowie Kuhn. It would have worked.
Scare the hell out of them all.
After all, isn't that what politics in Washington D.C. is all about?
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