The Washington Post

After months squandered on such trivial pursuits as the liberation of Kuwait, the savings and loan bailout and the search for a Democratic presidential candidate, Washington finally has focused on an important objective: getting itself a baseball team.

The National League Expansion Committee came through town on Monday, inspected Robert F. Kennedy stadium, interviewed the owners of a prospective Washington franchise and left after making the usual friendly but noncommittal noises about the chances of restoring baseball to the city after a 20-year absence.

Washington is in competition with Miami, Orlando, St. Petersburg-Tampa, Buffalo and Denver for the two new teams to be awarded later this year.

With all due respect to those cities (and their newspapers that carry this column), it is clearly in the national interest that Washington get one of the teams.

The arguments that were made to the Expansion Committee were all crassly commercial. Washington is by far the largest of the competing metropolitan areas. It is also the wealthiest. And it provides an immense television market. But that’s not the point.

Nor is the fact that, for parochial reasons, many Washingtonians feel they are owed a team. When the Griffith family hijacked the original Senators to Minnesota, Washington was promised a substitute.

It came but stayed only briefly before the late Bob Short pulled out for the supposedly greener fields of Texas.

Still, a fair-minded person (as I clearly am) has to acknowledge that if it were just a matter of satisfying the local fans, Washington would have no better claim to a team than the competitors in Colorado, Florida and New York.

What sets Washington apart—and to any objective observer makes the case compelling—is the national interest in restoring baseball to the national capital.

It is no accident, friends, that since baseball departed these parts, we have had a string of domestic policy disasters and political embarrassments of unprecedented scale.

From Watergate to the Keating Five and from gas-line “malaise” to $200-billion-a-year budget deficits, things have gone steadily downhill.

And the reason, simply, is that politicians here are denied the psychological solace and sociability that only baseball can provide.

You think it is an accident that all of our recent presidents have disdained dealing with domestic problems and gone tootling around the world looking for wars to fight or treaties to sign?

Truth is, that without baseball, there’s nothing to keep them at home from April to October.

George Bush is a baseball fan. (Put aside, for the moment, the fact that no real conservative would prefer the American League with its infamous Designated Hitter rule, as Bush does.)

If Bush had baseball available to him in Washington, he’d stay in town (at least during homestands) and might even notice little things like the recession that now escape his attention.

Baseball would end virtually all the squabbling in Congress, the Cabinet and the bureaucracy.

The reason those people spend all their time fussing at each other, instead of solving the nation’s problems, is that they are worn-out by having to go back and forth to Baltimore every time they need to see a baseball game.

Baltimore is a fine city, mind you, and the Orioles have an engaging young team, playing for one more year in a good old-fashioned ballpark. But Washingtonians need their rest.

Embassy parties (so I’m told) always end by 11 p.m. But by the time you’ve escaped the traffic after a night game at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium and have driven back south on Route 95, it’s well past midnight. So you start out surly the next morning and become more disagreeable as the day goes on.

The result is not only bad journalism—a lot of negativeness by the columnists and commentators. It’s also a lot of mean-spirited bickering among congressmen and administrative officials who are short of sleep.

You take those same people out to a ballgame that’s 15 minutes from home, give them two hours of schmoozing and bonding over hot dogs and beers, and I guarantee you that we’ll have agreement on a national energy policy and a lot of other things that have eluded us for 20 years.

You bring baseball to Washington and within a year, the threat of OPEC will be gone, and there’ll be health insurance for everyone. Taxes will be cut and the budget will be balanced. No other city can provide such a payoff.

You’re not convinced? Well, let me try a different track. How many of you would really like to humiliate Washington?

Get your revenge on the IRS? Send a message to Congress? Well, give us an expansion team and watch us grovel in the cellar for the next 20 years.

Whatever the rationale, just give us a team. Please.