Stadium Choices Are Threefold

Whatever the District does, the worst alternative is to reach a wasteful "compromise" by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to construct a park for the Nats on the same site as RFK. A new publicly financed park at RFK does nothing for anybody -- except the Nationals and baseball fans. For the city, it does nothing.

Even for the Nats, it poses severe risks. Due to the need for two to three years of environmental testing and permitting, the Nats might need to play in the current RFK for five years. Baseball honeymoons can last quite a while. But five years?

My parents lived on Capitol Hill for nearly 50 years, a short bike ride from RFK as a boy. No new park at RFK will ever have an iota of social utility. It will never be a "destination" like Camden Yards. A new park at RFK would increase the Nats' attendance and chances for baseball success. But that's all. If that's enough, build it.

If everybody had known one year ago what we all know now, then everybody would have acted far faster and compromised much more. A ballpark plan would have devised within the original $535 million limit, a lease with baseball would have been signed, MLB would have named a Nats owner and land for the park would've been bought so ground could been broken.

But none of that happened. Everybody involved, in baseball and in the District, messed up. Everybody gets an "F."

The District and its politicians now have a clear choice. They can take the cost-overrun risks inherent in building an expensive park, but one that may have enormous long-term benefits for the city.

Or they can simply renovate RFK, abandon plans for a new park and, presumably, doom the Nats to third-class baseball citizenship. Eventually, Washington might well lose the franchise -- again -- to some other city that would build a ballpark.

Or, the city can build a less expensive, but still extremely costly park at the RFK site. Baseball fans would cheer. The city would keep its team. But an enormous opportunity, with possibilities far beyond baseball, would be lost.