Washington Nationals mourn the loss of Frank Howard

Some upper deck seats at RFK Stadium were painted white, to show where Frank Howard’s monster home runs landed during his playing days with Washington’s Senators (1965-1971).

Howard, nicknamed Hondo, or the Capital Punisher, hit 237 career homers in a curly-W, with the big, hard-hitting slugger and one-time Senators’ manager Ted Williams joking that while those white seats were indicators of Hondo’s legendary power, the other seats represented all the times he struck out.

The humble, 6’7’’, 255 lb giant, whose history and impact in the nation’s capital reverberated long after he and the Senators left for Texas, died yesterday, at 87 years of age.