Plumbers in the Outfield - Meet the All-Watergate Team - NYTimes.com Illustration by Sam Manchester/The New York Times A fantasy team of baseball players whose names evoke the political scandal that broke 40 years ago. Richard M. Nixon was a baseball fan whose presidency was wrecked by the Watergate break-in, which happened 40 years ago Sunday. How do you properly commemorate the seismic political scandal of the 1970s while recognizing Nixon for rooting for the Washington Senators and witnessing Dave Righetti's no-hitter from George Steinbrenner's private box at Yankee Stadium? With an All-Watergate team. This is a fantasy team that has nothing to do with the playing skills of members of Nixon's White House staff. Still, it is easy to imagine H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, throwing high, nasty cheese at the members of Nixon's enemies list or Dan Rather. Instead, it's a roster of former major leaguers with the surnames - and in some cases, the full names - of Watergate-era figures from various fields. But not a single Haldeman played in the majors. It is not a great team. How good can it be when one catcher is Sam Agnew, who had a Bob Uecker-like career for three American League teams from 1913 to "19. Still, he is the only Agnew in Major League Baseball history, and no Watergate franchise should be without someone to evoke the disgraced Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, whose alliterative skills exceeded his ability to sacrifice runners over. A small article in The New York Times had a headline that could have referred to Sam or Spiro. It read, "Agnew Goes to Washington," and describes Sam's purchase by the Senators in early 1919. The other catcher is the first of several All-Watergate Nixons: Russ, who played mostly for the Red Sox. Now we gorge on Nixons. Not Pat, Tricia and Julie. But Otis, Donell and Trot, the starting outfield. The reserves: Babe Ruth (the third Watergate prosecutor was Henry Ruth); the one-armed St. Louis Brown Pete Gray (L. Patrick Gray succeeded J. Edgar Hoover as the F.B.I. director a month before the break-in); Chris Magruder (Jeb Stuart Magruder, was the No. 2 man at the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or Creep) and the former Met Kevin Mitchell (John Mitchell first served Nixon as attorney general and later became the head of Creep). The team needs a Cox, as in Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor forced out by Nixon during the so-called Saturday night massacre of 1973. Fortunately, plenty of Coxes have worn major league uniforms. Among them is Bobby Cox, the manager of the Watergaters. The pitching staff is led by Bob Woodward, who had a 4-4 record in the mid-1980s with the Boston Red Sox; obviously, he has the same name as the reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post. No major league Bernsteins exist to remember his partner, Carl Bernstein. The rest of the staff includes two Hall of Famers: Dizzy Dean (Watergate counterpart: John Dean, the White House counsel) and Whitey Ford (counterpart: Vice President Gerald R. Ford, who pardoned Nixon after replacing him). The others are an odd lot: Frank Wills (counterpart: Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate burglary); Len Barker (counterpart: the burglar Bernard Barker); Loyd Colson, who appeared briefly for the Yankees in 1970 (counterpart: the White House special counsel Charles Colson, who vowed to walk over his own grandmother to ensure Nixon's re-election); and Pinky Woods (counterpart: Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary, known for taping over 18 ½ minutes of a critical White House tape. And, heck, let's add one more Nixon: Willard, whose record for the Red Sox in the 1950s was 69-72. First base: Pete O'Brien. Background: the burglars broke into the Watergate to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee, which was led by Lawrence F. O'Brien, later the N.B.A. commissioner. Second base: Ron Hunt. Reasoning: E. Howard Hunt Jr. organized the break-in. Even more deserving than Hunt is Bobby Richardson. Rationale: Elliot Richardson resigned as attorney general rather than accede to Nixon and fire Cox. Shortstop: Woody Woodward and Maury Wills, once more evoking Bob Woodward and Frank Wills. Third base: Howard Baker, a .220 hitter in 29 games from 1912 to "15. Connection: Senator Howard Baker Jr. of Tennessee was the vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. His backup is Charlie Ziegler, who played in five games in 1899 and 1900 for the Cleveland Spiders and the Philadelphia Phillies. Watergate link: Ron Ziegler was Nixon's beleaguered press secretary, who once declared that previous statements he had made in his staunch defense of Nixon were "inoperative." Still, something is nagging. There must be one more Nixon worth adding to the roster, a Nixon who for some reason is a cut above Willard, Donell, Trot and Otis. That would be Al Nixon, an outfielder with decent statistics for the Brooklyn Robins, Boston Braves and Philadelphia Phillies from 1915 to 1928, whose nickname was Humpty Dumpty, and who was born with this full name: Albert Richard Nixon. He hit .277 for his career. We'll make him the designated hitter.