Now, This Was a Tough Week

By Thomas Boswell
Monday, July 14, 2008

The Nationals have had quite a week.

First, they were hit with the news that they have the smallest local TV audience in baseball, less than a third of the next-to-last team -- only 9,000 TV households, according to Nielsen data.

Next, The Post reported that the team's owners have refused to pay $3.5 million in rent to the District, claiming the club's publicly financed park is not "substantially complete," even though it's certainly in excellent working order for making money. The case might end up in binding arbitration with the team demanding $100,000 per day in damages since March 1 -- a total of more than $13 million and counting.

The Internet lit up with fan fury. How could the Lerner family be such ingrates? Didn't the District just build them a ballpark, on time and on budget, then hand them the keys?

Lost in the fuss was a central point. Baseball got a sweetheart deal in the $611 million ballpark. But the Lerners certainly did not. They paid full price. The guarantee of a new Washington park quadrupled the value of the Montreal Expos franchise. So, for $450 million, the Lerners got both the lousy Expos and a brand new park. Both were included in the $450 million price.

The real windfall winners were baseball's 29 other owners who immediately split up the Lerners' money. They're still chuckling. It's so profitable being part of a sanctioned monopoly.

But the Lerners aren't laughing. Having spent about a half-billion dollars for the Nats, including more than $40 million in their own voluntary improvements to the new park, the team owners want -- indeed, demand -- exactly the park they paid for. Right down to the last carpet and leak-free umpires' room. Their punch list: 22,000 items.

Of course, maybe they're counting each nail individually.

The District needs to understand that the Lerners are like a family that builds a house. Even after you move in there are plenty of details that have to be completed before you write your last check to the builder. Otherwise, you're a sucker.

Is Nationals Park "substantially complete," a legal term? Who knows? But if you walk around Nationals Park, you see plenty of unfinished details. In the Lerners' case, they can't get directly at the park's builders, CHS, to nag them because the construction contract is with the District, not the team. So the Lerners' leverage is to refuse to pay D.C.

"Nobody could have done what Clark Construction did to get this done [by Opening Day]. It was a modern miracle," principal owner Mark Lerner said yesterday. Then he began to recite an endless number of punch list and quality control items that are driving his family nuts.

Hello, Earth to Lerners, we have a disconnect.

Before they lose too much public goodwill over relatively small issues, the Nats' owners need to grasp that their toughness in enforcing contracts will bring them far more flak, some of it deserved, in the world of baseball than it ever did in building shopping malls. "The Lerners are scrupulously honest," a source in the building industry said. "But they negotiate every detail in a contract and hold you to it. It can get infuriating. They will fight you over the price of a FedEx package."

By Friday, both D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and the Lerners were mending fences, at least in public. "This thing will get resolved," Mark Lerner said yesterday. "Everybody will get a little blood on them. . . . In the end, everything will get compromised. . . . Remember, we have to see the city get what it paid for."

And, of course, the Lerners want what they paid for, too. Perhaps, instead of counting to 22,000, they could remember how well generosity and cooperation worked in the final months before the ballpark opened. Then, about a dozen of the Lerner company's best people jumped into the project to help get the park done by Opening Day.

As if the Nationals' week had not been tough enough, Friday brought more blows, including a tragedy when two fans, riding the Nats' free shuttle bus from RFK Stadium to Nationals Park, were killed when their heads struck a freeway overpass. According to D.C. police, the two victims were standing on the upper deck of the open-top bus, perhaps on the seats.

"Your stomach gets upset every time you think of it," said Mark Lerner. "All the rest of this is a minutia compared to that. We'll settle our disputes with the city. Things like that will pass."

Many in the Nationals' executive offices wish that something else would pass: the way General Manager Jim Bowden's name has shown up in headlines because he met with representatives of the FBI as part of a probe examining the illegal signing practices of international players.

The scandals that authorities are investigating, especially the skimming of bonus money allotted for Dominican prospects, have been an open sewer for many years. As a veteran baseball executive, Bowden has had contact with many people who may be the subject of investigation. However, the operative assumption should be that he has information that may help the FBI, but that he hasn't done anything wrong. What happened to the presumption of innocence? The same applies to his assistant, José Rijo.

"In my life, I've only been in the Dominican Republic once -- for two days in 1999. I'll show you my passport," a livid Bowden said on Sunday. "At no time when I met with the FBI agents were the questions involving around myself or José Rijo."

Rijo is also expected to speak with the FBI. But so are many others in baseball. In the wake of the Mitchell report, baseball has decided to become proactive in confronting its ethical problems and is encouraging cooperation. It's about time.

"It's been a tough week," said Mark Lerner. "We're taking it a day at a time. Everybody has bumps in the road."

The Nationals, and their fans, should remember that the life of a franchise is measured in decades, not in weeks.

Yesterday, Odalis Pérez had another quality start, leaving his ERA at 3.71. He lost because the Nats' decimated lineup scores less than any other team in baseball. But the rotation is real. The ERAs as starters of John Lannan, Jason Bergmann and Tim Redding are 3.40, 3.66 and 3.85. How many other teams in baseball have four starters with ERAs under 3.90 and at least a dozen starts each? The answer is nobody. None.

The Nats' rotation isn't great or close to it. But the fact that such a solid group could go unrecognized until the all-star break is typical of this Washington season. Underneath the injuries, the shutout defeats, the low TV ratings and the petty disputes over punch lists, the Nats have made plenty of quiet progress. They'll be worth watching. When? That's the mystery, the narrative addiction that binds fans to teams everywhere. To form that link requires time and memories -- including painful ones.

Nationals Park isn't going anywhere for decades, nor the team in it. Relax. A week of bad baseball news beats 33 years without it.