In a Monday press conference in West Palm Beach, FL, Nationals owner Mark Lerner said that his family is no longer exploring a sale of the team. Lerner made it clear to the press what the process had been like for over a year now.
“Nothing has really changed,” Lerner told The Washington Post’s Andrew Golden. “We’ve just decided that it’s not the time or the place for it. We’re happy owning the team and bringing us back a ring one day.”
Back in April 2022, the Lerner family had begun exploring a potential sale of the Nationals, which caught the attention of nearly everyone in the organization by surprise, especially considering the franchise won the World Series back in 2019. But since then, the franchise has been in a rebuild.
Mark’s late father Ted Lerner, a real estate magnate in the DC area, purchased the Nationals in 2006 for $450 million, after the team had been the Montreal Expos. 12 years later in June 2018, Ted passed control of the ballclub to his son, as Ted would pass away in 2023 at the age of 97.
Since then, all club decisions have been made by the entire ownership group, including family members Annette Lerner, Judy Lenkin Lerner, Marla Lerner Tanenbaum, Robert Tanenbaum, Debra Lerner Cohen, and Edward Cohen.
According to Mark Zuckerman of MASN, consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the team and the family’s commercial real estate business were significant and left some members of the ownership group to move on.
However, exploring their options through the 2022 calendar year, the Lerners found very few parties interested in buying the Nats, as those that were interested weren’t willing to meet the family’s asking price, which reportedly exceeded a very high $2 billion.
On a side note, if the Lerners were to sell the Nationals right now, they would be the second Beltway team to do so within a month after John Angelos sold the Baltimore Orioles to private equity billionaires David Rubenstein and Michael Arougheti for $1.7 billion back on January 30th.
Since that 2019 World Series title, the Nationals have endured four straight losing seasons in last place in the NL East. Throughout that tenure, the team reshaped its roster by trading away key players like ace Max Scherzer and shortstop Trea Turner to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2021, and then star outfielder Juan Soto to the San Diego Padres the next season.
In return, Washington acquired young talent such as catcher Keibert Ruiz and right-handed pitcher Josiah Gray as part of the deal with the Dodgers, as well as left-handed pitcher Mackenzie Gore and shortstop CJ Abrams in the Soto trade. Gray was an All-Star last season, while Ruiz was signed to an 8-year, $50 million extension last spring.
