Article from Marc Fisher's Raw Blog:
Posted at 08:49 AM ET, 11/ 7/2007
D.C. Pols Snipe at Nats
The rabble-rousers and cynics who populate the D.C. Council have never quite gotten their minds around the deal they made to bring Major League Baseball back to Washington. Now the city's politicians have gotten themselves in a snit over the fact that the Washington Nationals are staging some promotional events--gasp!--outside the city's boundaries, in the--avert your eyes!--suburbs.
The Nats, who struggled last season to attract fans from the Maryland suburbs--the Virginia and D.C. contingents were quite strong in attendance at RFK, thank you--are trying to address that gap in the emerging fan base by holding a FanFest in Bethesda and a gala social event at the new National Harbor development in Prince George's County. These horrific acts have caused members of the D.C. Council to cry foul. Even the council's responsible and thoughtful members are busy issuing idle threats and rending their garments: "The Nationals have an obligation to hold their gala here," Ward 2 member Jack Evans said, according to Nikita Stewart's story in today's Post. Evans was perhaps the most fervent supporter of the baseball deal.
Staging the gala across the Anacostia River in Maryland is "like taking a stick and poking your eye," said Jim Graham, the Ward 1 council member.
But of course the most appalling words came from Marion Barry Himself: "They haven't even gotten into the stadium yet and they are taking their events elsewhere. We would hope that the Lerners would rethink this decision. After all, this is not the Maryland Nationals. They are the Washington Nationals, and they should be holding any event concerning Washington in Washington."
This from the man who as mayor couldn't manage to cut a deal with the Washington Redskins to keep the football team in the District.
Where, exactly, do the D.C. politicians think the fans who will fill the new Nationals Park are going to come from? More than 80 percent of the region's population lives in the suburbs. More than 90 percent of the jobs are in the suburbs. The entire economic structure of the baseball deal, the single reason it made any sense for the city to put up $611 million to build a stadium, depends on luring suburbanites into the District to spend time and money, leaving behind the tax dollars that would repay D.C. taxpayers several times over for their investment in a ballpark. That's the strategy the Council bought into, yet when the team now tries to assure that that payoff occurs, the city officials play wounded doggie.
The more suburban the crowd at the new stadium, the better the deal for the District. The D.C. Council should be shoving Nats executives over the border to get them rustling up business in Montgomery, Prince George's and Howard counties.
There's no dissing of the District going on here: To the contrary, the gala event in Maryland is a charity fundraiser the receipts from which will go to support D.C. children, in part through the Nationals' Youth Baseball Academy, which was set up at the behest of the D.C. Council to teach the game to city schoolchildren. The Nats have regularly staged all manner of events at D.C. schools and at other sites around the city. But to be the regional attraction that they must be to make the city its money back--and to make big bucks for themselves--the franchise has to be aggressive about promoting itself everywhere from Baltimore to Richmond.
Small-minded, provincial hysterics from D.C. politicians are anything but helpful.
