Surprise news from Lerners creates plenty of new questions

ATLANTA – Davey Martinez’s phone rang Monday morning. It was Mark Lerner calling. Calling to tell the manager of the Nationals he and his family are beginning to explore the possibility of bringing on new investors to own the franchise or potentially even sell it altogether.

“To say the least, I was shocked,” Martinez said.

Who had even stopped to consider the Lerner family, which purchased the franchise from Major League Baseball in 2006, might have any interest in selling it to someone else? Nobody in the organization had ever so much as suggested the possibility over the last 16 years.

The Lerners are from Washington, born and bred. They won out on an intense bidding contest to purchase the former Montreal Expos in large part because of their local connections and family business structure, two qualities that particularly stood out to former MLB commissioner Bud Selig.

How, then, did we get here all of a sudden?

Well, it may not have been as sudden as we all felt it was. Truth be told, this has potentially been brewing for two years now, and that time frame is no coincidence.

On Oct. 30, 2019, the Nationals won their first World Series title. Ted Lerner, then 94, stood on the makeshift stage with his son Mark and was handed the Commissioner’s Trophy, a prize he waited his entire life to receive. It was the emotional high point of his family’s stewardship of the franchise.

It also should have been the financial high point. Except on March 12, 2020, the world shut down due to a still-new, still-unknown coronavirus. Little could anyone have known on that day how much havoc it would wreak on just about every facet of life we know.

It especially wreaked havoc with businesses, and the Lerners weren’t immune to it. Their commercial real estate company suffered, and continues to suffer, as people continue to work from home instead of their offices, and as shopping malls become a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, their baseball business suffered, unable to reap the benefits of that World Series title with the kind of subsequent-year windfall in ticket sales and merchandising that has almost always followed a championship in any major sport.

Put those two things together, and you start to understand why a business model that looked so robust only 24 months ago now looks much less secure.

The real question right now – and it’s one nobody seems to know the answer to yet – is whether the Lerners’ first priority is to bring in new investors to help infuse some much-needed cash to the franchise, or whether it really is seeking to sell the team to a new owner. It’s entirely possible the Lerners themselves don’t yet know that.

What they do know is what they’ve turned the Nationals into over the last 16 years. They purchased the franchise for $450 million. It’s probably worth at least $2 billion now. They opened a new ballpark, won four division titles, carried one of the sport’s largest payrolls for multiple seasons and turned D.C. into a baseball town.

Where, though, does the franchise go from here? Is this current rebuild, necessitated by the lack of enough quality prospects to replace the aging roster that won that championship, going to be brief or long? Are fans going to come back in droves, or is this just the beginning of a long downward cycle of interest in the team? Is Juan Soto still going to be a National in 2025, or will he sign a record-setting contract from some other organization?

All of that has to factor into the Lerners’ decision-making process now. Where do they see this franchise going in the short- and long-term, and how much do they still want to be in charge of it?

Prior to Monday morning, we never really had reason to consider any of that. Now we most certainly do. And that’s going to add quite another layer of stress to the experience of following the Nationals through what already promised to be a turbulent season.