Beware The Buyer

Never underestimate the Reinsdorf factor. The White Sox' owner wears the brass knuckles in the Selig administration. He and Smulyan are friends. Reinsdorf was baseball's point man in the fight to neutralize Angelos and move the Expos to the District. So, the way baseball thinks, that means Reinsdorf has juice when it comes to picking the new owner for Washington, too.

Washington needs to make it clear to baseball that Smulyan is a ticking political bomb. Opponents of the Anacostia ballpark have not disappeared. They've simply been waiting for fresh ammunition.

A community's only natural defense against a team skipping town someday is ownership with roots so deep in the area that moving the club would be as painful, at the personal level, to the owner as to the city. More important, a local owner whose business fortune is tied to Washington risks damaging his finances badly if he becomes a Short-like pariah.

The Malek group has worked for six years to bring baseball to D.C. and has the mayor's backing. The Lerner family would be eminently qualified -- rich, philanthropic, the deepest imaginable local roots. True, they never lifted a finger to help Washington get a team but, once it arrived and was a success, they said, "Wow, let's buy it!" But that's not a major problem.

However, if you want to see Washingtonians go bonkers, just try to jam a once failed, out-of-town owner down our throats after this area's business people and politicians have spent 30 years trying to get a team. Many have tried to make this point to Selig. Doesn't he remember the joys of dealing with Linda Cropp? Doesn't the name Marion Barry ring a bell?

My best guess is that if any outside ownership group gets the Nationals when several local groups are willing to pay the freight, then the money for the stadium will disappear. If the public is enraged, politicians will capitalize on it. Niceties of contract law and leases will be circumvented and the Nats would probably end up playing in a brushed-up RFK indefinitely. Baseball might then decide to move the franchise again. Talk about a colossal and unnecessary lose-lose outcome.

Perhaps such a stunning snafu is what baseball deserves after the shabby way it has treated Washington for years, culminating in the current Comcast-MASN battle that's left millions of fans unable to see most of the team's games on TV.

But it is certainly not what Washington or the Nats themselves deserve.

Building a $535 million park without a cent contributed by baseball is risky enough, even in the glowing light of the Nats' first season. However, constructing such a park then giving it to an out-of-towner with Bob Short proclivities would be insane.

Be warned, the folks who gave the Nats' TV rights to an owner in Baltimore are up to it again. The only way to stop them is to use the only leverage available: the new stadium. Memo to baseball's brass: Hope you guys like 44-year-old RFK and its authentic aroma of decay because if you stiff Washington again, that's what you deserve. And it's probably what you'll get.