Nationals' new park money machine

Andrew Zajac

D.C. region baseball fans still bask in the afterglow of the Washington Nationals opening night Sunday in their brand new $611-million, taxpayer-financed home on the Anacostia River.

What wasn't there to like, unless you were an Atlanta fan?

President Bush threw out the first pitch. The place was packed with politico-media glitterati. The home team beat the Braves on a walk-off homer by Ryan Zimmerman, the Nats' marquee player.

Too bad Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.. pictured at the right, was not around. If he were, the swells in the luxury boxes, particularly those connected to the Lerner family, which owns the Nats, likely would have poured Veuve Clicquot down his gullet.

Why Holmes?

In 1922, Holmes authored the legally laughable Supreme Court decision that gave baseball its anti-trust exemption, leaving the American and National Leagues control over the movement of franchises unrivaled among pro sports in the U.S. and arguably setting the stage for the gravy train that is the 2008 Nationals.

Read Holmes' mercifully brief opinion here: Download file

Other sports leagues operating without anti-trust exemptions manage to extract commitments for publicly-financed stadiums. Indeed, it's become almost de rigeur for cities to cave in to demands for new facilities from pro sports teams, particularly in the NFL.

But baseball has it easier than the rest.

There are no Al Davises running around suing and moving franchises without permission from the commissioner.

Shrunken markets like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati and Milwaukee cough up hundreds of millions of precious tax dollars for new parks laden with luxury suites lest the franchise move and its former host city be saddled with the perception that it's no longer 'major league.'

Consider what happened to the Nats. In 2001, they were the Montreal Expos playing in a stadium ill-suited to baseball -- it was built for the 1976 Olympics -- in a town that refused to build them a new facility.

Major league owners allowed Expos' owner Jeffrey Loria to buy the Florida Marlins and collectively bought the Expos from Loria.

They kept the team on life support, a non-competitive joke, for the next four seasons while shopping for a suitably lucrative new location, which turned out to be Washington.

They extracted an Download file agreement from the District's city council to build a tax-financed stadium before agreeing to locate the team hear and selecting an ownership group.

That arrangement makes it possible for MLB to demand the maximum franchise fee, in this case $450 million, without factoring in a new owner's burdens in paying for a new stadium. Because there aren't any.

While DC baseball backers contemplated a $340 million stadium back in 2004, city council wound up signing off on a $611 million park. Which means it cost more than $1 billion to bring the Nats to the district.

Surely a palace with this price tag brings with it a little love for the community that financed it?

Doesn't look like it. At last report the Nationals were begrudging hot dog vendors the chance to operate on the walk up to the park, nor did they want to indulge city council's desire for signage protesting the District's lack of a vote in Congress.

You've got to look at it from the Nat's point of view. There's plenty of food in the park. Why would you want to buy tube steak from the unwashed outside?

As for the sign, you could understand why the Nats might object.

Pretty much any ornamention decoration would ruin the park's exterior aesthetic. Think insurance, or banking, or medical, or real estate, or law or CIA front company offices. With light towers.

The architectural impact of the place is nicely summarized in this piece by Washington Post culture writer Phillip Kennicott.