| 1957 Washington Senators | ||
|---|---|---|
| League | American League | |
| Ballpark | Griffith Stadium | |
| City | Washington, D.C. | |
| Owners | Calvin Griffith (majority owner, with Thelma Griffith Haynes) | |
| General managers | Calvin Griffith | |
| Managers | Chuck Dressen and Cookie Lavagetto | |
| Television | WTTG | |
| Radio | WWDC (FM) (Chuck Thompson, Bob Wolff) | |
| ||
The 1957 Washington Senators won 55 games and lost 99 in their 57th year in the American League, and finished in eighth place, attracting 457,079 spectators to Griffith Stadium, last in the major leagues. Chuck Dressen began the year as their manager, but after the Senators dropped 16 of their first 20 games, Dressen was replaced by Cookie Lavagetto on May 7. Lavagetto, a longtime aide to Dressen, went 51–83 for the rest of the year, but would remain at the club's helm into June 1961, its first season as the Minnesota Twins.
The 1957 Senators set an MLB record which still stands for the fewest stolen bases by a team in a season, with only 13.[1] Washington left fielder Roy Sievers set a new team record with 42 home runs to the lead the Junior Circuit, as he benefited from Griffith Stadium's shorter dimensions in left and left-center field, which had been implemented before the 1956 campaign.
The 1957 season also marked the first time that Washington's American League franchise had used Senators as its official nickname since 1904. For 52 years (1905–1956), the team called itself the Nationals, with Senators as an unofficial, but widely used, secondary appellation. From 1957 on, headline writers and baseball journalists would continue to use Nats as an accepted alternative name for both this Senators franchise and its expansion-era successor, the Senators of 1961–1971, until the "new Senators" relocated to Dallas–Fort Worth after the 1971 campaign. Since 2005, the Nationals name is the official identity of Washington's National League franchise formerly called the Montreal Expos.