Baseball in DC!
It’s official, baby! Baseball is returning to DC. Now there’s the little question about what to call the team and while I am a strong supporter of the Senators, the Washington Greys would be a nice touch (name of the Negro League team).
But welcome back, baseball. I have a new favorite team.
EDIT: Oh, so the Va. Baseball folks want to blame Governor Warner for losing the bid:
But the deal derailed when Warner, a longtime baseball supporter who was once an investor in Collins’ ownership group, balked at a financing plan that would have pledged the state’s “moral obligation” to support the bonds, said Collins.I’m sorry, the state would have had a “moral obligation” to support bonds to build this man a stadium? When the alternative was DC’s plan, which Mayor Williams summed up:“It killed any chance we had of dealing with Major League Baseball,” Collins said in an interview Wednesday.
“It’s the team owners, business owners, the stadium users who are paying for this _ and not one dime of a D.C. resident is covering this important investment in our city.”(See first article)
So it’s the Governor’s fault for showing some fiscal restraint and that the Va. Baseball group was unable to come up with funding of their own? Huh.
Ultimately, if baseball was coming back to the DC area, it was going to go in DC. It’s the hub of the market and, really, who’s going to go all the way out to Dulles for baseball when DC is Metro accessable? The only thing a Northern Virginia team helped was Peter Angelos and the Baltimore Orioles’ market. Dulles is even more out of the way for anyone in Maryland, might as well go to Baltimore.
Collins (the Va guy bitching) has spent a lot of money and time on trying to get a Virginia team and that’s commendable, but DC put more on the table and won out. Sorry Warner wasn’t willing to promise baseball the moon for your efforts, man.
