Ballpark Deal's Salvation? Both Sides Chickened Out

In the end, they wore each other down. Major League Baseball's suits in New York got to the point where they didn't believe a word anyone on the D.C. Council said to them. Some council members took to openly referring to baseball's top executives as liars and thieves.

The mayor was reduced to self-pity. "People feel betrayed on both sides," Tony Williams said a few days ago. "There's bad faith on both sides. And I think the only thing everybody agrees on is they don't like me."

But it wasn't their attitudes toward the mayor that, at last, seem to have brought baseball and the council to end the soap opera about the Washington Nationals and a new publicly funded stadium near the Anacostia River in Southeast. No, a relationship born in mistrust and nurtured in back-stabbing survived for one overwhelmingly powerful reason: fear.

Baseball took a good look at its alternatives to Washington and came up empty. Northern Virginia would love to have the team. But finding a stadium site would be tough, and the state had zero interest in paying for a ballpark. The other cities that want baseball are so much smaller and less affluent that the sport's executives aren't even sure about whether to move the failing Florida teams to those hungry new markets.

Washington, on the other hand, is the dream sports market, jam-packed with disposable income and a relatively moneyed African American fan base to win over -- should baseball ever get serious about reaching out to blacks it has lost over the past generation.

From baseball's perspective, the deal with the District had to work, or else the Nationals franchise would be as good as dead. "It was time to declare victory and move on," said a key player in the negotiations between baseball and the city, whose name I can't use because he has been ordered by the commissioner's office to stay quiet. "It was fatigue, and it was a calculation that there was nothing left to be gained. But a lot could be lost, like the whole enchilada."

The D.C. Council's decision was not quite as clear-cut. While the Nationals were a big hit in their inaugural season at RFK Stadium, the sport suffers from the perception that it is a white, suburban pastime -- political poison in a majority-black city that, especially as gentrification makes many longtime residents feel destabilized and unwanted, is as race-obsessed as ever.

After three new council members were elected in part on their opposition to public funding of a stadium, the council developed a majority that saw considerable political gain in standing tall against the barons of baseball.

But here, too, fear prevailed. A majority on the council came to believe that the new stadium would boost the District's tax base by sparking retail, residential and office development. And, perhaps more important to the final outcome, the council members who made the difference between No and Yes grew frightened that the stadium mess would push deep into this year's election campaign, slapping the voters in the face with the council's failed brinksmanship and painful inability to close the deal.

Five members of the council are running for mayor or council chairman; they need to put as much time as they can between the embarrassing roller-coaster ride of the past year and a half and the election coming up this fall. That's why council chairman and mayoral candidate Linda Cropp moved so quickly from her initial reservations Sunday to the big smile she flashed for TV cameras last night as she embraced the deal.

But if fear brought the sides to what appears to be a real deal, mistrust is feeding persistent unease about whether this is finally the end of the story.

As night fell, no one on the council had seen full details of baseball's agreement. The council will vote today on approving a construction management contract and affirming the stadium lease.

The sniping between city and sport will likely continue for years, reflecting the deep misgivings in much of the District about spending $600 million on a stadium for a game that is barely played in most black neighborhoods. The next stage will be the debate about which group gets to pay $450 million to buy the Nationals.

The most vehement opposition from some D.C. politicians and neighborhood activists is directed at the ownership groups that are based out of town, particularly the group led by former Seattle Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan, a radio executive based in Indianapolis.

Last night, baseball executives were talking about announcing a new owner within 30 days. That's too late to make much difference in what is likely to be a less successful second season on the field. But potential owners say they can move almost immediately to improve the experience for fans and start generating more excitement about Washington's baseball team as a permanent institution.

Fear and fatigue are great motivators, but satisfaction requires stability and hope for the future.

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com