A roller-coaster baseball week

For the first time in my life, within the past week I attended two, count ‘em, two major-league baseball games. Because I was sitting both times in my season-ticket seats, I now truly feel like a baseball geek.

I must state, here at the very beginning of this post, the unpleasant fact that the Washington Nationals lost both games I saw. Against two of the palooka teams of the National League East–the Florida Marlins and the Pittsburgh Pirates–the Nats went down to defeat.

(Since then the Nats have beaten Pittsburgh once at home and Cincinnati once on the road.)

But there was good news, too–more important than wins and losses. After something like 17 months of procrastinating, Major League Baseball awarded the right to purchase the team to a group of investors led by Ted Lerner, a local developer with very deep pockets. The announcement was made late in the day on Wednesday. We halfway expected to see the Lerners at the ballpark on Wednesday, but they didn’t come until Thursday evening.

Then on Thursday morning, ground was broken for the new stadium. Many DC politicians, including race-baiters-come-lately Marion Barry and Vincent Orange, participated in this event. The Lerners were at the park on Thursday to watch the Nationals lose again.

Friday the Nats began a series against the Pittsburgh Pirates (even worse than the Florida Marlins) with a decisive win, 6-0. I had high hopes when I went to the stadium on Saturday to see game two against the Pirates. But no, after the batters got the score to 3-0 in favor of the Nationals after two innings, pitcher Ramon Ortiz gave up the entire lead before he was pulled from the game. Our guys ended up losing 5-4.

What does it mean that we will now have an owner? Most importantly, it will mean that our team is not owned by the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball. That is the status quo. The sale to the Lerner group will not be finally closed until mid-June. This means that for another whole month, the Nats are quite literally owned by the other team every time they play.

Most people I know are very excited about this new ownership group. The group centers on a business-oriented family that is very wealthy. They are a local family, which means there is no reason to worry that the team will leave DC any time in the foreseeable future. They are joined by Stan Kasten, who turned the Atlanta Braves into “America’s team” in the late 1980s-early 1990s.

In a way this feels like we have become subjects of a benevolent princely family of sport. But there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll be a happy subject.