Baseball quickly becomes capital's political football

America at Large: In Washington's two previous baseball incarnations, its teams were celebrated as "First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the American League", but less than four months after their rebirth as a nascent major league franchise the Washington Nationals are off and running.

As the 2005 baseball season approaches next week's midsummer All-Star break, the newly-formed Nationals have been the surprise of the year. With a 51-32 record, they lead the National League East, and threaten to end the decade-long reign of the Atlanta Braves atop the division.

Reliever Chad Cordero notched his 30th save of the season, tops in all of baseball, in Tuesday night's 3-2 win over the New York Mets, while Cuban exile Levan Hernandez boasts a 12-2 record. Both pitchers were selected for next week's All-Star game.

The Nationals' win over the Mets represented their 13th consecutive win in games decided by one run, tops in the major leagues, and extended their home record to 30-11, also the best in baseball.

Assembled by an "interim" general manager (former Cincinnati Reds GM Jim Bowden, the one-time "boy wonder of baseball"), and run by a 69-year-old manager, Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, the team's success has defied all logic.

When Major League Baseball (MLB) decided to resume its presence in Washington this spring, there were several good and compelling arguments against the relocation, some of them voiced by the already beleaguered residents who would be saddled with the tax burden of a new stadium.

Even some baseball-starved diehards weren't thrilled about the idea. Although they have been yearning for a team of their own since 1971, when the second generation of Senators pulled up stakes, moved to Texas and became the Rangers, their feeling was that Washington deserved a real baseball team, and not the deservedly-maligned Montreal Expos.

To the best of our knowledge the post-9/11 "security" argument was never promulgated, although it should have been self-evident that putting tens of thousands of people into a concentrated area just a few miles from the White House and the Capitol building 81 times in the course of a summer would be a complicated and expensive proposition. While the new facility remains on the drawing board, the Nationals are playing their home games at the antiquated Robert F Kennedy Stadium.

The Expos had drawn execrably in Montreal over the past several years. Once targeted for elimination by "contraction", the team was instead taken into receivership and operated by MLB itself, and over the previous two seasons divided its "home" schedule between Montreal's Stade Olympique and Roberto Clemente Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The Lords of Baseball were even more penurious with the vagabond franchise than they were with their own teams, and, with a payroll of $48.5 million, the club figured to be hopelessly uncompetitive. (The New York Yankees' 2005 payroll, by comparison, is over $205 million.)

But attendance has averaged over 32,000 per game, up from fewer than 10,000 per date in the club's Montreal/San Juan incarnation last year; a club that had been losing $10 million annually is projected to show a $20 million profit this year.

Despite the team's giddy on-field success, storm clouds are gathering above the capital in anticipation of a decision on permanent ownership, due sometime next month. Commissioner Bud Selig has forecast a mid-August deadline for the sale, and a team for which MLB paid $120 million in 2001 is expected to fetch upwards of $400 million by the time the final hammer comes down.

At least eight posses of potential investors have been assembled to vie for the prize, and the final showdown is already taking on the trappings of a political showdown. On one side is a cabal headed by a major Republican party fund-raiser, former Nixon aide Fred Malek, who was one of George W Bush's partners when the White House occupant was the president of the Texas Rangers.

On the other side of the political spectrum is the well-heeled bid of currency trader George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, baseball fan extraordinaire and outspoken critic of the US administration's war in Iraq.

The battle lines thus drawn have attracted the unseemly interest of some highly-placed Congressional sources, including Virginia Republican Tom Davis, who chairs the House Committee on Government Reform, which conducted a highly-publicised investigation into steroid use in baseball earlier this year.

Davis was instrumental in persuading MLB to relocate to Washington (a time-honoured Congressional weapon, that of threatening to re-evaluate the antitrust exemption enjoyed by baseball, was once again persuasive), and (with encouragement from the White House, we suspect) appears to be setting himself up as the guardian of public morals on the ownership issue.

"We finally got a winning team, and now they're going to hand it over to a convicted felon (Soros was convicted of insider trading - in France) who wants to legalise drugs, who lives in New York, and spent $5 million trying to defeat the President?" asked Davis.

"You've got a league with a steroid problem, and you're going to sell the team to a guy who is pro-marijuana? I don't think we need or want that in the nation's capital. I just don't think you want such a polarising figure."

But with such pronouncements, Davis has himself become a polarising figure. "Why should politics have anything to do with who owns the team?" asked California Rep George Miller, a Democrat. "Is Congress going to get involved in every baseball ownership decision? Is Congress going to fire a manager they don't like?"