The Washington Nationals open their 20th anniversary season in the Capitol City today vs. the Philadelphia Phillies. The fact that the Phillies have more recognizable names of (former) Nats players than the hometown nine tells you something about the state of baseball in the DMV.

You’ll find Bryce Harper, Trea Turner, and Kyle Schwarber—all former Nats stars—playing for the Phils. Now try and name one current National who will play at those levels in his career. Yes Jacoby Young plays unparalleled center field defense. McKenzie Gore shows promise as a starting pitcher. And perhaps homegrown product James Wood may get to that level eventually, may being the operative word here. But really? It is telling that not a single Nat made Joe Posnanski’s list of Top 100 players in the game today.

As Joe has written time and time again, the problem with the Nationals is that there’s no cohesiveness and no buy-in from ownership or the team itself. “Sure, they got some prospects when dealing off all the superstars from their 2019 World Series team; that’s the easy part. Building a TEAM out of those prospects, that’s where the challenge comes.”

Think about Nats fans born in 2001.

“In your relatively short lifetime, the Nationals had one of the greatest runs of talent accumulation in the long history of baseball… and there’s nothing left. They’re all gone. Harper is obviously gone. Strasburg is retired. Soto was traded and will now hammer your team as a Met. Turner was traded and will now hammer your team as a Phillie. Scherzer aged out.

They’re all gone. In an alternate universe, you could have watched Bryce Harper and Juan Soto play their whole careers in Washington, you could have watched them go into the Hall of Fame as Nationals, you could have maybe taken your own kids to see them play the way your parents took you to see them play. Can you even put a price tag on that?

Instead, all that’s left are a few prospects, lots of losses and the memories of an October back in 2019 when it all somehow came together. That doesn’t seem as good a deal.”

The Nationals finished last four straight years after winning a World Series “and would have finished last again last year if not for the horror show Marlins.” That’s the first time that has ever happened. In history! The Nats problem is ownership . . . just as it is with the majority of MLB teams. Baseball owners just want to make money. Period. Again, Joe Posnanski has a spot-on take on this issue.

“Why should we care if baseball owners make a dime on the game? Owning a baseball team is not like owning The Gap or Ameritrade or some financial services company or some telecommunications company or some billboard company. I don’t think of it as a “business” at all. Owning a baseball team is a privilege, it makes you one of the biggest people in town, it connects you in a deep way with this great game, it gets you all sorts of perks (and tax breaks) that money cannot buy, and it allows you to compete against other billionaires for something money alone cannot buy—a World Series trophy.

Making money isn’t and shouldn’t be even the slightest consideration. If a baseball owner wants to make money, sell the damn team, you’ll get billions of dollars for it because there’s a line out the door of ultra-rich people who have bought all the jets and yachts and vacation homes they can buy and are looking to get into one of the most exclusive clubs on earth. No, the whole point for a baseball owner should be to try and win games, try and win championships, whatever it takes.”

Mark Lerner and his family are cheap, while making money hand-over-fist building on public investment and fan loyalty. He’s complained about the salaries of free agents, as if we’re supposed to feel bad for a billionaire owner. Posnanski noted that “if you’re lucky enough to make $100,000 a year, it will take you 10,000 years to get to a billion.”

Don’t have any sympathy for these guys.

Writer J.J. Phillips spoke the truth when he wrote: “Mark Lerner and his family need to start investing money into Major League players like the billionaires they are. Only then will the top echelon of free agent talent start to once again view the DMV as an attractive landing spot for someone who wants to win, like they did when the team was on top of the NL East in the mid-2010s.”

So we head into the 2025 season with low expectations (which, as my friend and brilliant reader Dolores likes to say, are the key to happiness.) But we still love the game. As Annie Savoy reminds us in Bull Durham, Walt Whitman once said,

“‘I see great things in baseball. It’s our game. The American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’ You could look it up.” *

It is, indeed, a blessing.

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So let’s move our Saturday Soundtrack up to Thursday in honor of opening day, and kick off the 2025 season! And I’ll begin with a song that I know one reader in particular will appreciate.

Want to feel like you are sitting in the ballpark? Grab a cold one and then give a listen to Nancy Bea Hefley, the stadium organist for 27 years for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

In the first full season in a very long time without the great Willie Mays alive to grace the game, let’s honor his memory with Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song).

Willie, of course, played centerfield, a position memorialized in John Fogerty’s classic Centerfield.

And we’ll end with the song we all want to sing in a ballpark full of fellow fans . . . because, of course, America needs more communal singing.

Play ball!

More to come . . .

DJB

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*Here are two other favorite quotes (out of many) from Bull Durham. The first just seems appropriate for our time, and perhaps the second does as well.

“Hey. Relax. Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. It’s more democratic.” 

“The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.”

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Photo of Nationals Opening Day ceremonies during a happier (and more optimistic) time . . . 2017 . . . by DJB