It’s front-page news in today’s Washington Post: “Nationals Owners To Dig Even Deeper: Lerners Plan to Spend Millions More On Improvements to D.C. Ballpark.” In the accompanying article, Post baseball writer Tom Boswell reports that the Lerner family will “spend at least $30 million to improve the city-financed ballpark under construction on the Southeast waterfront,” including a snazzier scoreboard and rotating ad boards for the hitter’s eye in center field.
All of which is well and good, but why’s it on page one? As Boswell himself reports, the Lerners have only committed to about $10 million in upgrades so far, including an expanded restaurant and luxury suites, though a city source say a $30 million price tag for all the team’s proposed additions is “not unrealistic.” And though the stadium will be city-owned, the increased revenues from the new features - including higher ads fees from the expanded scoreboard - will all flow solely to the team’s owners. Add in that the Lerners will get a 31% discount on their expenses via revenue-sharing deductions, and the headline might as well have read “Nationals Owners Invest In Own Product.”
Instead, we got “Dig Even Deeper,” an odd turn of phrase, given that the team’s share of costs was only projected at less than 20% of total costs when it was a $440 million stadium, and a fair bit less than that once the price tag hit $631 million. Possible explanations: Slow news day on the holiday weekend, sop to the paper’s top baseball columnist (Boswell, it will be recalled, blew a gasket when the D.C. council briefly tried to cap public costs at $580 million), or the usual credulousness toward owner pronouncements that infects sports coverage when there are press passes to be handed out.
Or maybe it was just the man-bites-dog frisson of a baseball owner spending his own money on his own stadium, in a town where two years of headlines have gone the other way. If that’s the standard we’ve sunk to, this is going to take even longer than we thought.
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