By Thomas Boswell
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
VIERA, Fla. -- Nothing cements a team to a city like concrete.
Now, solid as a million pounds of steel on the Anacostia waterfront, the Nationals are here -- the Nats are home -- for good.
Promises are nice. Plans are fine. But nothing speaks with the sincerity of bulldozers and cranes. Last season, baseball returned to the District, but it came with a tiny, haunting asterisk. Huge crowds, bouncing stands and a pennant race for a team with Washington on its chests seemed, for a certainty, like the return of the sport to the nation's capital after a third of a century.
But none of that first-kiss bliss was real in the modern sense -- the money sense -- until Tuesday, when the agonizing prenuptials of mistrust between MLB and D.C. were finalized after more than a year of bad-faith fibs and financial infidelities.
Pour tons of gravel, mix a mountain of mortar, send light towers to the sky and spend a ransom that ancient kings could not have imagined. Then you know that the courtship of a major league team and its betrothed city is truly a marriage.
That, finally, is where we are now. Throw confetti in the air. If it doesn't come down, if gravity has been repealed, then start to worry again. Otherwise, have faith that 611 million reasons to believe, each with a picture of (George) Washington on it, are enough. Baseball is back not for a summer, but forever. Or at least a baseball eternity, like that old Senators run from '01 to '71.
On Tuesday, word filtered to the Nationals' spring training camp that a lease for a new stadium on the Southeast waterfront was about to be finalized. Relief, mixed with a shell of self-protective disbelief, was mixed in the faces of the Nats. After years as baseball orphans in Montreal, not one has bought a permanent residence in the Washington area. Why would they? Now, why shouldn't they? They'll just have to come to grips with being adopted, at last.
"This is one huge step for us, one large obstacle out of our way," Manager Frank Robinson said. "After all this time, we'll be on an even playing field with the other 29 clubs. It will be a tremendous shot in the arm for this team. They will feel like they are 'whole' as a team. This is a tremendous boost for our whole organization. The cloud of uncertainty will finally disappear."
All spring, Nats players have bitten their tongues on any public comments about negotiations before immediately asking for every available detail. "It's not our business" is the official team line. Now, that facade can disappear.
"It seems like 10 different deadlines have come and gone," said pitcher John Patterson, grinning. "This is going to be great for our fans. After everything this team has been through, this will give everybody something to feel positive about."
Over 35 years, the concept of emotional finality -- a true resolution of our feelings -- has become almost incomprehensible to Washington baseball fans. Even now, the last defensive barriers of cynicism will die hard. Surely, buried in a devious document drafted by a soulless MLB suit lurks some deal-killing deception. Or, perhaps, some council member, desperate for a last flailing moment on stage, will find one last objection.
But it's not so. Not this time. Just like the arrival of last Opening Day, we'll have to become resigned to contentment.
"This will be great for the city and great for the team," veteran reliever Joey Eischen said. "Now, the next job is to get an owner. We need somebody to back us. I want to know who I'm playing for, not the collection of owners I've been playing for the last few years."
The Nationals should have had an owner long ago. Commissioner Bud Selig was overprotective of at least two local ownership groups -- led by Ted Lerner and Fred Malek -- who never demanded that MLB fight all their battles with the D.C. Council for them. Now that a ballpark lease has been finalized, every week that passes without a new owner is an unnecessary loss of time to a franchise that has been hamstrung in every conceivable aspect of the game since last season.
As the ownership derby comes to the 16th pole, Lerner and his family are still considered in the lead. "We noticed that Mark Lerner [Ted's son] was in spring training last week, hanging out with [General Manager] Jim Bowden," a dispirited member of a rival ownership group said this week. However, by baseball tradition, the ownership decision lies so exclusively with the commissioner that the only person who truly knows how Selig leans is Mrs. Selig -- if Bud talks in his sleep.
Soon enough, ownership and management soap operas will have their hour. This day, however, has handed over to dreams. Of a new ballpark and of the revenue it would produce to acquire better players. A recent study has shown that, in the first five to eight years in a new ballpark, the average team wins five to six more games. Think what that would have done for the '05 Nats.
"I hope the new park looks like the rest of the city with all the pillars and white stone," Eischen said. "Go to the stadium and it would be a little bit like walking into the Lincoln Memorial, but it's your ballpark. Fans would love it. 'Come check it out.' "
Even Robinson could not resist playing what will soon be Washington's leading parlor game: amateur stadium architect.
"I hope our new ballpark sets a new trend and doesn't just follow one," Robinson said. "When Dodger Stadium arrived, I think it was the first big-league park that looked out into the landscape -- at the [San Gabriel] mountains. Royals Stadium [in Kansas City] felt unique with the waterfalls. Camden Yards set a new direction, too.
"Just so long as you can see the U.S. Capitol from some spot in the ballpark, that's all people will talk about. When the new San Francisco ballpark opened, everybody raved about the views [of the Bay]. Well, you had to go in the upper deck to see the water. But that's what you heard about. Just make sure you can see the Capitol from some seats."
One year ago, an Opening Day at RFK Stadium almost seemed like a mirage, so good that it must surely disappear. Yet it didn't. And the season that followed that, as well as the crowds that watched, surpassed expectations.
Now, one year later, after months of cold pessimism, the panorama of the Nationals' future has opened again, full of new spring light, not the old shadows of free agent pitchers lost over the winter and news of scandalously bad TV contracts.
Last year at this time, the first Nationals' honeymoon was beginning. This second romance will not be quite as easy. Picking a new owner is delicate work. And actually building a ballpark, rather than simply agreeing to fund one, will take years.
Still, this was a watershed day for baseball in Washington. Last year it arrived. Now it will stay.
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