Nation’s Capital Ready to ‘Play Ball!’

From the glass-partitioned lobbying firms of K Street to a dusty waterfront tract destined to make way for a new stadium, the nation’s capital obsessed Wednesday about something besides politics for a change, exuberant about the return of baseball.

All it took was the long-awaited announcement from city officials that Major League Baseball had agreed to move the Montreal Expos to Washington. Fans went into overdrive.

The rootless baseball team has no local owner, no sales outlets, no permanent stadium and no new name -- but that proved no impediment to a town eager for the return of the American game.

Schoolchildren and talk show listeners spent the day debating the most fitting name for the new team. Baseball traditionalists wanted the Senators -- the name once owned by the city’s hapless, long-gone American League team -- or the Grays, once a mainstay of the old Negro League.

Modernists suggested the Monuments or the Metros. Wags had a field day, imagining the Washington Rhetoric, the Gridlock, the Beltways, the Pundits, the Cons.

In scores of city offices, workers talked of pooling their money to share season tickets not yet for sale. The leading prospective buyer for the team, the Washington Baseball Club, was deluged with 1,000 season ticket requests in a single day -- adding to its waiting list of 10,000.

“Interest has already been high, but this takes it to a new level,” said Winston Lord, the club’s executive director.

And from the Capitol to K Street, political operatives and officeholders diverted their attention for a few hours from the looming presidential race to wonder aloud if baseball would replace Redskins football as the city’s premier sports attraction.

“Baseball games are going to be the new place to do business and fundraising in this town,” said Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster. “Remember, the intersection of baseball and politics is money.”

On his way from a meeting in the Capitol, Luntz listened in on a crowded elevator as two congressmen -- one an unidentified Californian -- talked about their newly divided loyalties. “One of them,” Luntz recounted, “says to the other: ‘Next year, I’ll focus on the Washington team. This year I’m focused on the Dodgers.’ ”

Presidential politics may play a role in shaping baseball’s future in Washington, said Tony Coelho, the former Democratic California congressman and political insider. “If [President] Bush wins, baseball will really be the only game in town,” Coelho said.

As a former owner of the Texas Rangers -- the Senators before their 1971 move -- Bush “would make the new team his team,” Coelho reasoned. “He knows a lot of the baseball owners, and they’ve raised a lot of money for him. He’ll have them in and he’ll wine and dine them. If [Sen. John F.] Kerry wins, it’ll still be a big local thing, but not quite on the same level.”

Outside a finance and lobbying nerve center at 19th and K, two commercial lending specialists on a cigarette break shrugged at the notion of baseball supremacy. Puffing into the wind, lender Jim Sherrick, 39, predicted that baseball games would become just another venue for entertaining clients -- nothing more, nothing less.

“I’m sure my firm will get tickets,” Sherrick said, “but I don’t see it going beyond that. It’s just one more way of doing business.”

Few residents were more ecstatic Wednesday than Senators fans who felt betrayed by then-owner Bob Short’s decision to move the team. Like dreamy Brooklyn Dodgers die-hards, Senators loyalists have spent three decades pining for a replacement, certain their prayers would never be answered.

“You can’t imagine what today is like,” said John Sery, 53, a former American Film Institute technician who treasures a home movie he took of the defunct team’s last home game in 1971. Typical of the star-crossed Senators, it ended in a forfeit to the New York Yankees as thousands of fans streamed onto the field with one out left in the game.

“It’s been so agonizing for so long,” Sery said. “This city would always get so close to getting a team, but it kept slipping through our hands.”

When the Senators left in ‘71, it was actually the second time in a decade that Washington fans had gone into mourning. Owner Calvin Griffith moved the original team -- which had been around since 1901 -- to Minnesota after the 1960 season. A year later, an expansion version of the Senators arrived.

Wednesday afternoon, Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams was wearing a replica of a red Senators cap when he turned up at the City Museum and informed a cheering crowd that Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig had called him an hour earlier with the official good news.

While boasting that “baseball is back,” Williams acknowledged that city officials would have to navigate a series of hurdles to ensure that the team could play next spring at the aging, 45,000-seat Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. A legal framework to start the $15-million process of renovating RFK will be handed to the City Council this week; public hearings on Williams’ ambitious plan for a $440-million stadium to be built on the Anacostia River will start in October.

Taxpayers “won’t spend a dime” on construction, Williams said. Bonds financing the arena are to be repaid by annual rent, taxes on tickets and stadium concessions sales and a proposed new business levy expected to reap $3 million a year.

But there is already grumbling about Williams’ reliance on public financing from some political leaders -- among them the newly reelected councilman and crusty former Mayor Marion Barry, who has vowed that Williams’ plan will succeed “over my dead body.”

Out in the warren of salvage yards and brick row homes where Williams plans to build his riverfront stadium, there was a sense Wednesday that baseball had arrived, whether they liked it or not.

Tired from a long morning of hauling scrap metal, salvage man John Walker, 54, said he worried about what the neighborhood might lose if a stadium rose over N Street -- the proposed project’s northern border.

“I’d hate to see some of these homes go,” he muttered. “The baseball people [are] going to need a lot of pull to make it happen.”

If the mayor’s construction plan is passed by the City Council and survives a threatened referendum fight, a strip of brick houses and apartments would fall to the wrecking ball -- along with a tumble-down landscape of scrap yards and garages. Williams and other city officials hope a new baseball arena would revive the waterfront area, giving life to a commercial strip of restaurants and stores.

“It’s not the greatest thing in the world for me,” said Aaron Harrison, who stood in the doorway of a row home that probably would be bulldozed. “But that’s progress. If it helps the city out, how can I be against it?”

Harrison, 41, who works as a security supervisor at the city’s Convention Center, figures he can always find a new apartment. But he hopes to have a son one day, maybe two, “and what’s better for a father and a son than to go to a baseball game now and then? My dad was a huge baseball man, and he kept telling me we’d get another team here one day.

“I just wish he was still alive to see it.”