ARLINGTON, Texas — Ascend the stairs to the second level of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame at Rangers Ballpark here and you’ll run right into a page of Washington baseball’s past: a tribute to the expansion Washington Senators, who moved here in 1972 and were reborn as the Rangers.

Look closely at Frank “Hondo” Howard’s first Rangers jersey, and you can see that the “Senators” cursive stitching is still there, a sign of the transition from D.C. to the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.

It’s encouraging to see the expansion Senators get a little love, even from another franchise. Most paeans to Washington baseball history make a big deal of the first iteration of the Senators, the Walter Johnson-led franchise that secured a World Series win in 1924. That team left D.C. for Minneapolis to become the Twins after the 1960 season. Resigned to a footnote, too frequently, are the expansion Senators, who played in Washington from 1961-1971 and were beset by win-loss records that ranged from fair-to-middling to wretched.