The team will coalesce. It will be built the right way. The Lerners will build a winner for the long term. The fans will come and the ratings will increase. The team will be healthy. Rome wasn’t built in a day. DC is a great sports market. It is big enough and lucrative enough for many teams to prosper across many sports.
Winning will help; building a tradition will help; more media marketing will help; and activating more of the blogosphere will help. The Nationals will be a huge success. This is a good article on some short term issues but long term I believe in the Washington Nationals and how successful they will be here in the DC marketplace.
Baseball isn’t really as interesting on TV as it is on the radio or in person, unfortunately. It’s really not a good sport for TV at all.
Of course, the author of the article is right in reason #1, the Nats have the worst record in baseball. Do they have minor league talent? Right now, they do in some spots because so many of the players have been hurt (and some still are). After a while you run out of options.
Consider that only one player of the starting 8 (Guzman) from opening night hasn’t been on the DL this year, and right now half of them are *still* on the DL (Milledge, Dukes, Zimmerman and Johnson) and two (Kearns and LoDuca) just got off the DL. Also the team’s All-Star closer is done for the year…it’s ugly.
That said, the P-Nats won their division’s first half in the Carolina league, Harrisburg has a winning record (49-40) in the Eastern League, and Columbus is in first place, their plan is going well…
wow! read the article. Lets see…. team is a loser, no star players stick around, huge tv issues, very spotty attendance(for a brand new staduim especially if you use actual attendance as opposed to tickets sold), huge tax payer money used to build staduim, and apparently staduim related issues. Sadly this all sounds too familiar to me.
Be careful dc or the franchise may move again.
At least the nats are no longer owned by bud{mlb) and the current owner appears to have a plan which includes keeping the nats in dc. Take it from my experience,the lerners are the key, good ownership can and will make it work.
ps–karma and respect wise, it is time to stop issuimg retired montreal expo uniform numbers to nat players. the expos only retired three numbers (carter 8, raines 30, staub and dawson 10), so how hard would it be to stop issuing said numbers?