National Pride: Baseball Returns to Washington
By Sarah Kellogg
Photographs by Howard Ehrenfeld

When Irwin Raij arrived at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium on the evening of July 21, he wasn’t coming for the baseball. He was there to find D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, the principal architect of baseball’s Washington rebirth. Williams and 35,441 other fans were in the 45-year-old stadium that night for its grand reopening after a much-needed facelift.

Raij, a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP and a member of its sports industry group, had been one of the firm’s cadre of lawyers responsible for shepherding the Montreal Expos to their new D.C. home. It had been an arduous, multiyear journey that he and others hoped would end that evening.

After spending much of the afternoon and early evening shuttling between his Georgetown office and various city government buildings, Raij arrived at RFK in the seventh inning with the Washington Nationals trailing the Chicago Cubs and a sheaf of legal papers at his side.

“We all wanted the team’s sale to be completed that day, but we weren’t sure it would really happen,” recalls Raij.

With a staff badge in hand, Raij quickly entered the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission offices at RFK, which has been home to both football (Redskins) and baseball (Senators). Williams was there. The mayor had already received and signed the document Raij needed to ensure the sale of the Nationals to the Lerner Group. Raij now needed one last signature. The sale would be final at that point, with the $450 million electronic transfer of funds to Major League Baseball (MLB) on Monday morning a mere formality.

Raij had been rolling since early that morning, coordinating with MLB and the Lerners, reviewing documents, responding to requests for last-minute changes from the District, and registering documents with the city. He worked in the D.C. Attorney General’s Office until 8:30 p.m. to finalize the details. As Raij carried the precious documents through the crowd to the Lerners’ luxury box, he felt tired, but was also excited.

“The good news was when I got to the Lerners’ box, they had a kosher buffet out,” says Raij. “I grabbed a sandwich. That was my lunch and my dinner. I have to say that sandwich was pretty satisfying.”

Little had been satisfying in the prior week for Foley’s team. MLB had declared the city in default for not meeting its negotiated timetables on the lease agreement, and there had been a last-ditch effort by city officials to rework the leases to the advantage of local developers. Things had looked grim.

But there Raij was that Friday night, standing with Lerner Group principal owner Edward Cohen—one of Theodore Lerner’s sons-in-law—and watching him sign the final document. A round of congratulations followed, and Stan Kasten, the team’s president, walked into the press booth to announce the sale.

By the time Raij left the stadium, the Nationals had rallied in the late innings to beat the Cubs 7–6, capping off a legal, sports, and political odyssey that had begun in Canada years before. Raij hitched a ride home with Mark Lerner’s son. The deal was done.

It had been more than four years since MLB had purchased the struggling Expos; nearly two years since Washington had bested five other suitor cities in the courtship race for the team; and almost three months since MLB had announced the Lerner Group as the Nats’ new owner.

For the parties involved, the final day was an emotional and legal roller coaster. The entire journey had been marked by moments of exaltation and defeat, by grand gestures and good intentions, by legal sleight of hand and political high jinks. Now, once again, Washington had a baseball team.

For Sale
When Major League Baseball stepped in to purchase the Montreal Expos in February 2002, it was an act of self-preservation, and a first. MLB had never owned one of its own teams before, but the options for rescuing the Expos were dwindling. The Expos’ revenues had dropped along with attendance and profits. Worst of all, the franchise was ripe for the plucking by some independent-minded owner who might take the team and move it somewhere that best suited his or her needs and not MLB’s.

Montreal was reeling, in part, from the 1994 strike. The Expos were ahead in the National League East by six games when play stopped on August 12 that year. Fans never quite recovered from the offense and neither did revenues. And though Montreal fought for the team, baseball wasn’t as natural a fit for the city as hockey. It didn’t help that the owners—a combination of local investors and government interests—couldn’t agree on how best to save the team.

The Montreal Expos and the Minnesota Twins were MLB’s poor-orphan franchises, with 2001 operating revenues of $34.2 million and $56.3 million, respectively. (The New York Yankees had revenues of about $217 million that year.) The two teams were being blamed by many for weighing down MLB’s already sluggish fortunes.

A series of management and ownership changes had placed international art dealer Jeffrey Loria as the Expos’ managing principal owner, and by 2001 he had grown weary of fighting to keep the franchise afloat. He was looking for a way out by either moving the team or selling it.

Enter Major League Baseball. Commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig announced in November 2001 that MLB would cut two teams, although he didn’t name any names. The Expos and the Twins were the most likely candidates.

“The concept was that in the long run it would benefit everybody by contracting the Expos, a team that was a perennial consumer of everybody else’s money,” says Mary Kay Braza, who chairs Foley’s sports industry group. “The Expos were never going to contribute back into the revenue-sharing pot, and the team was never going to contribute as a real competitor for the other teams. The Montreal Expos were always going to be a loser.”

But a lawsuit kept the Twins in play, and a collective-bargaining agreement with the players delayed any other contractions until 2006. Montreal was spared, but for how long? The commissioner had a unique, and what would turn out to be a lucrative, solution: buy the team.

MLB’s decision to pay Loria $120 million for the Expos triggered a round of musical chairs that would affect three teams and place nearly $1 billion in play. With his proceeds and a loan from MLB, Loria purchased the Florida Marlins from John Henry, who went on to purchase the Boston Red Sox for $700 million.

“For the owners, this was a very important transaction,” says David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. “It allowed them to control the process, and it really did allow Major League Baseball to acquire an appreciating asset. The decision on where it would move was too important to risk not having MLB’s involvement.”

The Contenders
For Major League Baseball, finding a new location for the Montreal Expos would come before finding a new owner. By securing the perfect location, MLB would have maximum control in negotiating the terms of a stadium deal and could, if the deal favored MLB, increase the selling price for the team.

Although there remains some debate about whether Washington was the odds-on favorite to snag the team—it was the largest market on the list, and larger than most of the cities with franchises—Washington officials never felt that way.

“One thing was clear to me when I began this process: it was an uphill battle,” says Mark Tuohey, chair of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission and a partner at Vinson & Elkins L.L.P. “A number of people, including the commissioner, did not want to bring this team to Washington. [Orioles owner Peter] Angelos had too much of a grip on the region. We had to demonstrate we had the political will, the economic resources, and the fan base to make it a success.”

Washington’s proximity to Baltimore was a hurdle, as was the city’s failure to keep a team in the past and its reputation as a difficult place to get things done.

At the very least, competition for the baseball franchise would be tough.

Cities from across the country, along with those in Mexico (Monterrey) and Puerto Rico (San Juan), had come a-courting for the Expos to MLB’s New York headquarters or to the various All-Star games between 2000 and 2004. The lineup extended from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portland, Oregon. Las Vegas was a prime contender as well.

Two other bidders were a line drive away from each other—Washington and Northern Virginia—and unfortunately within 50 miles of the Orioles and the feisty, and some would say defiantly litigious, Angelos.

Yet, despite Angelos’s early and vocal opposition, a combination of factors made the Washington region an ideal candidate: a flush fan base, a flourishing economy, successful corporations willing to lease lavish luxury boxes, and a burning desire within the business and political community to have a team.

The Washington area’s interest in securing a team wasn’t just a passing fancy. Ever since the Washington Senators decamped to Texas to become the Rangers in 1972, Washington fans had been looking for a new team. The economics weren’t good, though. Washington was viewed by many as a failed city that was mired in red ink and losing population daily. The District was one nasty snowstorm away from financial collapse.

In 1994 a Northern Virginia consortium had gotten serious about bringing baseball back to the region, forming the Virginia Baseball Club and making a bid for the two expansion teams MLB was pitching that year. Led by Virginia telecommunications executive Bill Collins, the club competed with Orlando, Phoenix, and Tampa for the new franchises. Washington didn’t have a chance. The Major League owners were set on Tampa and Phoenix, but Collins did plant the seed for a Washington-area team and was confident enough leaving the meeting to begin looking for a site.

Collins continued his efforts through the end of the 1990s, securing the support of Virginia’s local and state officials to back a publicly funded stadium package and making bids on the Houston Astros and the Expos. Both bids failed.

Meanwhile, District officials had been bitten by the baseball bug. The city’s fortunes were improving, and a surge of development brought new businesses and residents into the city. The District became a metropolis that could support a team, maybe even deserved one.

But Washington needed its own Bill Collins. City leaders went looking for that person and found him in Fred Malek, the respected businessman and former official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. Malek also happened to be an avid baseball fan. He had been part owner of the Texas Rangers with George W. Bush before Bush had sold the team and become president. Malek had the savvy to put together a diverse and winning ownership group.

“The mayor felt it would be a great opportunity for the city to bring the Montreal Expos to Washington, but they didn’t have an owner,” says Malek, chair of Thayer Capital Partners, the merchant bank he founded. “He came to me and asked me to do it. I’ve always loved baseball, and I said I would. At the point we started, our objective was to bring baseball to Washington. A secondary objective was to own the team.”

Malek formed the Washington Baseball Club in 1999, and the club entered into a formal agreement with the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission in 2002 to serve as a financial partner in bringing a team to the city. In exchange for its support, Malek and his ownership group would be the city’s favored owner and gain exclusive rights to any new ballpark.

With a deep-pockets buyer on board, the city fleshed out the rest of the D.C. team, putting together a group that would include the mayor and his top staff, members of the D.C. sports commission, and D.C. Council members. Negotiations would be conducted with Commissioner Selig’s office and the owners’ relocation committee chaired by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf.

“It’s a whole different world negotiating and dealing with professional sports,” says Lloyd Jordan, a sports commission member and partner with Holland & Knight LLP, who had been through similar negotiations in St. Louis over the Rams football team. “Sports teams basically have a monopoly. Once you have a monopoly, you don’t necessarily have to play with others. It’s your ball, and you can do whatever you want with it. These guys generally are not affected by public sentiment.”

Sweet Pitch
All that was left was crafting a bid that could attract the interest of the commissioner and the ownership committee but wouldn’t raise the ire of the District’s politically volatile council or residents. The winning bid would clearly have to include a sweet pitch for MLB in terms of the stadium. The sweetest pitch translated into public financing.

“It was clear to me that baseball had issues with the financing,” says Tuohey. “Baseball wanted it financed entirely by the location. At that time our position was that was not going to work, but we had to put our heads together. We finally came up with a concept that would serve our needs and baseball’s needs.”

MLB was looking for a city that valued a professional sports franchise and would add to that value through careful cultivation and attention. A well-managed team could raise the city’s profile nationally while also sparking a local renaissance. It could invigorate a community, building civic pride.

Raij and Richard Weiss, Foley’s managing partner, were given the unenviable task of sifting through the thousands of pages of bids, looking for that complex formula that would guarantee a successful team. The process was equal parts science and art, despite the fact that MLB had fashioned clear guidelines in relocating teams. Factors to be considered ranged from the concrete, the cost of land purchases, to the ephemeral, the sports culture of the particular city.

“Clearly the economics were . . . a significant part of it,” says Weiss. “What exactly was going to be the investment of the public entity, and what form would that take? What process was necessary to approve it? These were all part of the proposals. Those things came in all kinds of flavors.

“But it isn’t just how much money is being raised and where it comes from. We were looking to see what they had done in total to ensure that the franchise was going to be successful.”

As Washington was working its deal, the other cities bidding for the team were putting their best faces on as well.

Las Vegas worked hard to win the stadium, and it offered up a deal that would be financed mainly through private sources. But MLB declined, in part, because there was no place for the team to play while the stadium was constructed. Norfolk’s bid received a thumbs down even though it offered a publicly financed stadium.

Ultimately, it was politics more than money that sank Northern Virginia’s bid. The Virginia Baseball Club, favoring a site near Dulles International Airport, would have used public and private sources to finance its stadium. Yet a change in power in the governor’s office and in the general assembly eliminated the diehard baseball fans, and lawmakers refused to stand behind the bonds for a stadium, despite earlier agreements to do so.

Washington got the news it was hoping for on September 29, 2004. The rumors had been flying in its favor, and a late-afternoon telephone call confirmed it. The franchise was moving from Montreal to the District of Columbia. Later that night the Expos played their final game in Montreal, losing to the Florida Marlins. The owners voted in December to confirm the decision, 29–1. Angelos was the lone no vote.

After the September 29 announcement Foley’s lawyers were charged with turning the proposal into the baseball stadium contract, a construction agreement, and the RFK licensing agreement. The clock was ticking, since the goal was having the Nationals start the 2005 season in Washington. To do that, any agreements would have to make it through the D.C. Council by the end of December.

The decision was to go for less detail. The heavy lifting would be reserved for a later date, after the council and the public had gotten acquainted with the stadium deal.

“If we produced a 400-page document crammed full of highly technical legalese, that was not going to be helpful,” says Weiss, noting that Foley turned around the documents within 45 days. “We sought to embody in a relatively short document the basic concepts and core concepts.”

With the details to be worked out later, the strategy now was for both the city and MLB to show good faith as they moved forward through the process. “Having the council approve the basic deal, and having baseball take the first major step by actually physically moving the team from Montreal to here, would produce a momentum that would be the glue that would hold all of this together.”

The Deal
Mayor Williams and the sports commission had two months to get the deal approved by the council. No easy task, given the fact that council members and the mayor were traveling to China in October and the election was in November. Ultimately, the election proved fateful, resulting in the exit of three members who favored public financing of the stadium. Their replacements were not so hospitable to the idea. One of them was former mayor Marion Barry.

D.C. Council Chair Linda Cropp has been called both villain and savior in the stadium saga. An early cheerleader for baseball, she ended up serving as the grand inquisitor when the stadium agreement came before the council, ferociously picking apart the accord.

Members of the council started asking questions about the deal that fall, especially after their constituents wondered why the city was constructing a costly facility along the Anacostia waterfront, not too far away from dilapidated housing and abject poverty.

The council tabled the stadium agreement that November, setting the stage for the infamous December 14 meeting. In the days before the meeting, commission staff scrambled to address Cropp’s concerns about cost. The day of the meeting, Cropp was worried about the penalties the city might have to pay if it didn’t deliver the stadium on time. She wanted some of those waived, but MLB wouldn’t budge.

At the council meeting Cropp offered a late-night amendment requiring $142 million in private funding for the stadium. Cropp’s amendment passed 10–3, putting the entire deal in jeopardy.

Observers say Cropp was in a tough spot. She was trying to mollify constituents, who would ultimately decide the fate of her run for mayor in 2006. She couldn’t ignore the results of the recent election, in which the voters punished candidates who proved too generous to Major League Baseball and its owners.

MLB officials were furious at Cropp, the council, and the mayor. The next day MLB announced it would be halting its business and promotional operations until the original agreement was restored. It set a December 31 deadline for winning council approval of the deal.

“The legislation approved by the District of Columbia City Council last night does not reflect the agreement we signed and relied upon after being invited by District leaders to consider Washington as a home for Major League Baseball,” said Robert DuPuy, MLB’s president and chief executive officer.

With the stadium agreement at risk, Cropp, working with Williams, was able to find a compromise before the deadline. On December 29 Williams signed the financing package into law. The city would be allowed to issue $535 million in bonds to finance the stadium.

Looking back on the play, sports business experts say council members had a right to be angry.

“I don’t know what the nut was that had to be cracked exactly,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College sports economist and author of In the Best Interests of Baseball? The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig. “Right now you’re looking at a public investment in excess of $600 million. Washington is a tremendous market for baseball. I don’t think it needed to make that kind of financial commitment. It seems like the mayor was bidding against himself.”

The mayor has his defenders.

“The mayor was quite reluctant to go as far as they wanted him to go,” says Malek. “It’s more than we thought it was going to be, but if he hadn’t done that, I don’t think he would have gotten the team. They were really resisting coming to Washington because of Baltimore.”

By Baltimore he means Angelos. A Washington team would encroach on Angelos’s territory, especially his broadcasting territory, and he had been promised exclusivity when he purchased the Orioles for $173 million in 1993.

“When we learned that that was going to be accomplished, we obviously were concerned,” Angelos told the House Committee on Government Reform last April. “Concerned, one, that [we would be] including a team, not 50 miles away, . . . but actually some 35 miles away, if you measure from border to border.”

At that same hearing Williams himself acknowledged that things did not go as planned during the negotiations.

“I’m trying to bring a team here under very difficult circumstances where I’m dealing with a monopoly,” he said. “When you’re dealing with a monopoly, it’s very difficult. You don’t get a perfect deal.”

After that fateful December, the city and MLB would be deadlocked again and again on the stadium contracts, with the disputes dragging through 2005 and into 2006. The problems would require a mediator, former Detroit mayor and Michigan Supreme Court justice Dennis Archer, to arbitrate a settlement in January 2006 as the parties wrangled over any number of details in the construction agreement, including the completion deadlines, the quality of the luxury suites, the transportation plans, and the design of the parking garages.

The stadium agreement was finished in March 2006. The city approved the sale of $611 million in public bonds to finance the stadium and related expenditures, such as land acquisition and upgrades to the Navy Yard Metro station. The bonds would be paid off by a combination of rental payments from the team’s owners along with user fees on tickets, utility taxes, and gross receipts taxes on large businesses.

“Watching Major League Baseball come into a new community like Washington is like watching a play by Shakespeare that you’ve read many times,” says Mark Rosentraub, dean of the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, who has written widely on the sports business. “The play’s the same, but all the actors keep changing, so you’re never quite sure exactly how it will turn out.”

Land Dispute
Washington was able to build the stadium finally, but it would have to acquire the land first. City officials were confident they could do it through the right of eminent domain, which allowed the government to take land for public purposes, including for economic development. The only restriction was the requirement that the land not be handed over to a private entity. The city’s position was confirmed by the June 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, which gave a green light to such takings.

“We had always proceeded in assuming that the way Kelo was decided was going to be the law,” says former D.C. attorney general Robert Spagnoletti, who oversaw the city’s stadium legal work until he stepped down from his post in October. “While it certainly made it easier for us, we had entered into the agreement and had planned on using eminent domain in a way that was consistent with Kelo.”

The city would need about 14 acres to accommodate the 41,000-seat park, which would have 78 suites, a conference center, a restaurant, a team store, and an arcade. The city favored the Anacostia waterfront property sandwiched between South Capitol Street and the Navy Yard in Southeast. MLB preferred the Banneker site, south of L’Enfant Plaza.

The only problem with the city’s preferred site was that it was occupied by 23 landowners—a mix of commercial, industrial, and residential tenants—many of whom, including several strip clubs, weren’t willing to leave, not at the price the city was offering, about $98 million.

Spagnoletti said property owners had little recourse given D.C.’s quick-taking law. And once the Supreme Court had issued its Kelo ruling, the dispute quickly turned from a legal one to an economic one.

“The money is in the registry,” says Spagnoletti. “Now a court can decide whether or not what we’ve estimated is fair-market value for the properties.”

Barry Hartman, a partner with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP who represented some of the landowners, says his clients understood that the law would be working against them, so they went forward with a lawsuit challenging the District’s estimate of how much it would cost to purchase the land to build the stadium.

“We were challenging the mayor’s actions under the law, saying the actions weren’t consistent with the law approved by the council in terms of the $611 million cap,” says Hartman, noting that the land would boost the cost of the stadium above the cap and thus breach the legislation.

The courts didn’t agree.

The land dispute did deliver one of the more humorous moments in the Washington Nationals saga. Hartman, who was certain MLB was involved in the undervaluing of the land, tried to serve a subpoena on the commissioner at his New York office. The concierge in the building refused to let the server in the elevator. Employing a resourceful trick, Hartman sent flowers to MLB congratulating it on the Washington deal. The server was allowed to go up to the offices and serve the subpoena.

“The card just congratulated them on the addition of the new team,” says Hartman. “You do what it takes.”

Broadcast Rights
As MLB and the city were fighting over the stadium, a separate issue was generating the kind of headlines usually reserved for pennant races and World Series victories. Amazingly, the Orioles had snagged the Washington Nationals’ broadcast rights.

In March 2005 MLB and the Orioles entered into an agreement giving the Nationals’ production and exhibition rights to TCR Sports Broadcasting Holding, LLP, which was doing business as the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN). TCR was originally formed as a holding company for the Orioles. Under the agreement, the Nationals were paid $20 million for their broadcast rights. The fee would increase to $25 million in 2007. MLB would own 10 percent of MASN, and it could transfer its ownership at its discretion to the Nationals.

The agreement drew more than a few complaints. After all, Angelos had been no fan of the Nationals moving to the region, trying to sink the deal behind the scenes with the other owners and eventually being the lone vote against relocation. Now he was going to profit from its presence.

Outsiders say it’s not surprising. MLB owed Angelos something. It had given the TV rights for the region to the Orioles back in 1981. And the Nationals’ entrance into the area would prompt an Orioles’ revenue drop, which it did in 2005 and 2006, as D.C. fans stayed home instead of heading to Baltimore for their baseball fix.

“Angelos didn’t have any legal authority to fight it,” says Zimbalist. “He was just huffing and puffing. Baseball didn’t want a disgruntled owner, so they made a deal with him. It was a deal that will work for the Nationals franchise. I don’t think they gave away the store to him, but they had to sweeten it.”

But a sweet deal for Angelos turned sour for Comcast Corporation, the cable giant that runs Comcast SportsNet, which has broadcast Orioles games for more than a decade. Comcast officials were stunned on two fronts: they had lost the Orioles broadcast rights and their hopes of winning the Nationals rights were thwarted.

Within a month Comcast was challenging the deal in court. Comcast said its contract with the Orioles included a right-to-match clause, which would allow the company to bid for the Orioles’ broadcast rights once the contract expired. Comcast officials say the creation of MASN, which would show Orioles and Nationals games, violated that contract.

“The most valuable programming is the live professional sports,” says John Schmidtlein, a partner with Williams & Connolly LLP and an attorney for Comcast. “When a regional sports network invests . . . tens of millions of dollars, they build their network and brand their network by identifying themselves with teams. They want to have some control over the situation so that they’re not going to wake up one day and find someone else has stolen those rights.”

As negotiations turned bitter, and its legal maneuvers were rejected in the courts, Comcast declined to show Nationals games to any of its 1.3 million subscribers. It wasn’t just a fit of pique, officials claimed. MASN was overcharging local cable operators to show the games. Another point of contention was the fact the games were the only programming available on MASN.

MASN went up with 24 hours of programming in July, and its attorneys argued that Comcast’s complaints about the price didn’t keep the more than half a dozen other cable companies in the region from signing up for the broadcasts.

“What Comcast is doing is taking its dominant position as a distributor and using that to protect their dominant position as a regional sports network,” says David Frederick, a partner with Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, P.L.L.C., who is representing MASN. “Their objective is to drive us out of business. If they can do that, they get the rights to the Nationals and the Orioles at bargain-basement prices.”

The drought not only affected fans, it drew politicians into the fray, including the U.S. House of Representatives. Earlier this year the House Committee on Government Reform called David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president, Angelos, and DuPuy to testify, offering some pointed words of encouragement in reaching a deal.

In July the Federal Communications Commission stepped in as well. As part of its order allowing Comcast to buy part of Adelphia Communications Corporation, it ordered the parties to reach agreement on the broadcast dispute or end up in arbitration. A day before the deadline for mandatory arbitration, Comcast and MASN reached an agreement. Under the deal, 1.6 million Comcast customers were able to view Nationals games in September.

New Owners
With a stadium deal finally in place, Major League Baseball could select the new owners. For years MLB had been meeting with the various ownership groups—there were eight bidders competing for the Washington franchise. MLB made a decision early on to cap the price at $450 million, giving it more freedom to select the ownership group and helping it avoid charges of favoritism and collusion.

“Baseball held onto the team deliberately until it got all the stadium issues closed,” says Braza. “It could have sold the team in December 2005 as soon as it got that first baseball stadium agreement passed. The counsel to Commissioner Selig was that we ought to take this through to get a lease signed so that we have something real to deliver the new owners. Partly what they were paying for was a territory with a new stadium that would allow it to generate the economics to be a competitive team.”

Finding the right owners was a process that combined the search techniques of a headhunter and a matchmaker. The new ownership group had to be compatible with the 29 other owners: mostly white, male, and immensely wealthy.

“The league wants an owner who will play nice with the other owners,” says Carter. “It’s a little like selecting a Supreme Court justice. You think you know what an owner’s going to do when you pick him, but maybe years down the line he doesn’t do it. You’re making an educated guess.”

Wealth is always a factor. And diversity—in both skills and race—was a key dynamic in Washington, with the city and local politicians watching from the stands to see if MLB was looking for minority owners to serve as mere window dressing or as real contributors to the franchise. D.C. Council members Marion Barry and Vincent Orange raised enough objections in the days before the ownership announcement to prompt a last-minute lobbying campaign by the Lerners to dispel any doubts.

The bidders included a who’s who of Washington power players, and a few well-known outsiders. Fred Malek and Jeffrey Zients headed the Washington Baseball Club’s group. Former Seattle Mariners owner Jeffrey Smulyan led another group, but a strike against them was that Smulyan didn’t live in the area. Rounding out the top three was the family of Bethesda real estate titan Theodore Lerner.

The Lerners’ bid was strengthened considerably with the inclusion of Stan Kasten, who originally had been part of another group. Kasten is one of the most respected names in the business, earning his chops in Atlanta as president of three professional sports franchises at the same time: the Braves, Thrashers, and Hawks (baseball, hockey, and basketball).

Malek and his team may have looked like the frontrunner, but it soon became clear that the Lerners were the leading contender. The Lerner family—managing principal partner Ted, his son Mark, and two sons-in-law—would have about a 90 percent stake in the team.

“We thought we had the advantage—not the inside track, but the advantage,” says Malek. “We had been widely credited along with the mayor for bringing baseball here to Washington. We had great diversity in the group. We thought we had a strong balance in our group in terms of experience.”

The splashy press conference unveiling the Lerner Group was a formality, but it was a chance for Ted Lerner to introduce his capable and respected colleagues. It was a heady moment for Lerner and his family and the 10 partners in the venture.

“It has long been my dream to bring the national pastime back to my hometown, the nation’s capital,” Lerner said that day. “Now that it’s been realized, I plan on doing everything I can to make sure that this franchise becomes an international jewel for MLB, D.C., and the nation.”

Two Years Counting
Washington baseball fans have known heartache, and they are likely to experience it again in the next two years. This time it won’t be the result of the Washington Senators skipping out in 1961 for Minnesota or the second Senators franchise deserting in 1972 for Texas. Instead it’s likely to come from the political and financial battles that will boil up as the city tries to finish the stadium and develop the area in the adjoining neighborhood.

One potential battle could arise as a result of a personnel change. With baseball booster Williams exiting, and the likely election of Adrian Fenty, the mayor’s office may be a less eager partner and a more wary observer in the stadium drama. After all, Fenty was always skeptical about a publicly financed stadium, fearing the city would be left holding the bag financially.

But that doesn’t mean the Nationals won’t be any good, or the hot dogs and beer at the park won’t be fresh, observers say. As much as the owners and the city focus on the money, Washington fans are likely to remain loyal to the team and its players. Experts say the team, the sports commission, and the politicians should do all they can to encourage that relationship.

“Sports are supposed to be the sandbox of life,” says Carter. “When it leaks out of the sports pages and finds itself on the front page or the business section, it’s really not what sports fans are looking for. They want a diversion. They don’t want a lawsuit.”

The Lerners will be doing what they can to win the fans’ favor. They are intent on healing the wounds caused by the disputes of the last two years. They have promised to focus on rebuilding the franchise after years of neglect.

And they won’t lay down for the District. They have expressed concerns about the city’s timetable for completing the stadium, and have criticized the city’s efforts to push developer Herb Miller’s 13-story, mixed-use project, which also includes parking spaces for the stadium. The Lerners prefer parking facilities that are easier to complete. The multifaceted project, they fear, may be too complicated to finish by spring 2008, when the stadium is scheduled to be completed. The Miller project lost even more momentum in September as the developer struggled to find financing and squabbled over buyout offers with the city.

What is certain about the next two years is that there will be little rest for the attorneys, both the city’s and the Nationals’. A big commercial construction project is a nightmare of details even in the best of times. Throw in the knotty issues around the construction of a professional sports stadium in a politically antagonistic city like the District of Columbia and the concerns grow exponentially.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead,” says Raij. “We feel good about how far we’ve come, but we know we’ve still got a long way to go.”

Or as the Yankees’ beloved Yogi Berra aptly said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Freelance Sarah Kellogg wrote about disaster recovery in the July/August issue.