Business With MLB Goes Beyond Price Tag

"Baseball told these [bidders] to keep their mouths shut and be patient," said one person close to Selig. "And that's what the Lerners did."

Partnership

As spring training opened in mid-February, the Nationals, unable to sign marquee free agents during the offseason at least in part because baseball officials had left them without an owner, felt unstable.

On top of that, there was still no lease on the proposed $611 million, publicly financed ballpark, the jewel that sold baseball on Washington in the first place. League officials -- who the previous year had said repeatedly that the sale was imminent -- now were adamant that without a lease, defining the terms under which the team would rent the stadium, there would be no owner.

That the lease emerged as a last-minute stumbling block caught both the District and baseball by surprise, according to officials on both sides. It took months for city and baseball lawyers to agree on a lease document, and once that was done, it needed to go to the council for approval. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), baseball's chief political backer in the city, and league officials had believed the lease would be a formality. Instead, by being thrown back to the council, it resurrected the heated debate of late 2004 over whether the city should be building a stadium for the Nationals.

What little goodwill that had been built up between the league and the council during the Nationals' first charmed season quickly dissipated.

Selig refused to budge on the sale. "No buyer is going to buy a franchise and say, 'Where do I play?' " said Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane Jr., a Selig confidante. "It was a more valuable franchise to sell when there was a stadium deal done."

Williams began lobbying Selig in several telephone conversations to time the announcement of an owner with the approval of the lease. Selig would not agree. In the meantime, there was significant political pressure building.

Malek, a former aide to President Richard Nixon, had many influential friends around town. Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) both contacted Selig on Malek's behalf. Williams and several council members had long backed the Malek bid, not in small measure because of the work the group had done to land a franchise in the first place.

Smulyan is close to Reinsdorf from their days as owners together. Smulyan, despite some fears that he wasn't from Washington, had gained favor with the D.C. Council because his group, which included several prominent Washington area African Americans, worked behind the scenes to bridge the gap between baseball and the council on the lease agreement.

The lease was finally approved on March 7. A couple of weeks later, as he stopped by the Nationals' spring training in Florida and met with the team's general manager, Jim Bowden, Kasten had a revelation.

"Reading the tea leaves, it became apparent to me that the presence of a predominately Washington-based owner was going to rule the day," he said. "I came to understand that my group was not going to prevail."

From the outside, the potential advantages of a marriage between Kasten and another group seemed obvious. In late 2001, when the Boston Red Sox were sold, Selig chose a group led by John W. Henry and Tom Werner that included Larry Lucchino, a seasoned baseball executive who had successfully run both the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres, a man who Selig trusted would do a superior job. The same theory seemed to apply in Washington, where Kasten, now believing he couldn't succeed on his own, became a free agent.