It’s a good time for Beltway baseball, as the Orioles come to DC this week sporting the best record in the AL to face a Nats team that, if the playoffs started today, would be an unexpected Wild Card at 17-17.
New owner, new era for the O’s…and when WaPo’s Barry Svrluga was in-studio with JP Finlay Monday talking about the situation, and ‘how close we are to having two functioning MLB franchises that are bot good 30 miles apart,’ he let the beat drop that someone we all know and (maybe) love is still lurking to maybe make that a possibility once the MASN issues are resolved?
“I think we’re done with the War of the Roses, because MLB always expected the Lerners and the Angeloses to work out this MASN thing and it didn’t work, but David Rubenstein said it’s not worth the attorneys’ fees, so that will get solved in some way,” Svrluga said. “Mark Lerner said this offseason they’re no longer looking to sell the team, which to me means they didn’t get their price – but I expect later this year, as the MASN stuff gets solved, Ted Leonsis, with that clarity, will come back to the Lerners with a new offer.
I believe he still wants the team, and with the Caps and Wizards staying in DC, I think he wants to think of himself as a District guy, part of the solution of helping the city, and I think that because he’s invested so much in the Monumental Sports Network, he wants to have a summer’s worth of programming, upgrade that whole game, and be a bit of a savior. That’s predicting on my part, but it’s a lot of educated predicting.”
And don’t worry, Beltway denizens – JP was born right around the Orioles’ last World Series win and Svrluga is an early Earl Weaver-era baby, and both agree it’s okay for long-time residents to support both.
“What if you want to go and just kind of root for everybody? Do you think I'm a fraud?” JP asked.
“No, I don't think you're a fraud and here's a very specific one – I’ve got a decade on you, and if you grew up in the Cal Ripken era and your only option to go to MLB games was to go to Camden Yards, but you’re in southern Montgomery County or the District and a new baseball team dropped out of the sky that has Washington in front of its name, which is the teams you root for across all of their sports, then I do think there's a way to feather it and be like, yeah, my AL team is the O’s and my NL team is the Nats,” Svrluga said. “I remember not long ago that if you came in on 295 into the District from the BW Parkway, there used to be a big billboard that said ‘Welcome to Birdland’ right there. So I don't think it's crazy that there are people like you that could root for both teams – and I’d also would argue that there are 0.0 people who are from Baltimore who are like, I'm a huge Nats fan, too. You're fitting in that perfect little niche of DC-centric people who grew up without a baseball team and now have one.”
Take a listen to all of it above!