Monumental Sports & Entertainment CEO Ted Leonsis, who offered more than $2 billion to buy the Washington Nationals from the Lerners last year after the family announced it would explore the possibility of selling the team in April 2022, confirmed Tuesday that he remains interested in adding the MLB franchise to his professional sports empire.
In February, Mark Lerner, the Nationals’ managing principal owner, said the team was no longer for sale, but people familiar with the Lerners’ thinking have said they expect the family would consider a new offer after the 2024 season, should a bidder surface.
“I’ve told employees; I’ve told the Lerner family: ‘We are very interested. And we will figure out the right time and place to come with a thoughtful, dignified, real offer,’ ” Leonsis told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “And they can say yes, they can say no. They can say, ‘We want to keep the team.’ But our fidelity on our strategy and our belief that it’s how the future will unfold: You’re going to see markets have mergers and acquisitions and build platforms to be able to build bigger businesses.”
Leonsis, who owns the Capitals, Wizards and Mystics as well as Monumental Sports Network, originally outlined his plans Tuesday morning during an interview with the Sports Junkies on 106.7 the Fan. He was making an appearance to announce the moving of a Mystics game from Entertainment and Sports Arena to Capital One Arena, and he was asked whether he would make another bid for the Nationals, to which he replied he would “make a credible and strong offer.”
Leonsis purchased NBC Sports Washington, the regional sports network that broadcasts Capitals and Wizards games, in 2022 and rebranded it as Monumental Sports Network last year. He told The Post that acquiring the Nationals “really does make sense from a business standpoint for Monumental Sports,” as it would bolster the network’s summer programming.
“We need to have scale so that we can compete with the New Yorks and the L.A.s as a community,” Leonsis said. “Having winter programming — Caps and Wizards — and then summer programming — the baseball team and the women’s basketball team — and owning the venues, I think we can compete from a business standpoint, from a revenue standpoint, with those really big markets. In baseball, you really need to have a big base of revenues to be able to afford putting great lineups out there.”
When the Lerners explored a sale before the 2022 season, the asking price was somewhere around the $2.4 billion Steve Cohen paid for the New York Mets in 2020, according to people familiar with their thinking. But everyone from Lerner family members to MLB officials doubted the Nationals would receive the offer they wanted until the uncertainty and litigation surrounding their television revenue was resolved. When the Nationals moved into the Baltimore Orioles’ television territory in 2005, MLB brokered a deal that gave the Orioles the Nationals’ television rights in perpetuity. The Orioles have disputed nearly every dollar an arbitration committee has told the team to pay the Nationals since.
A resolution to the MASN situation never seemed likely while the Angelos family, long resentful of the Lerners and the arrival of the Nationals, controlled the team. But new Orioles owner David Rubenstein, who partnered with Leonsis in exploring a bid for the Nationals, has offered reason for optimism, promising to find a way to resolve the dispute.
“I think all of baseball, and all the fans of Baltimore and Washington, would like to see this resolved in a friendly, amicable way in the near future,” Rubenstein told The Post before Opening Day. “And that’s my goal.”
The Nationals declined to comment, and Rubenstein didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
With no deadline to get a potential deal with the Nationals done, Leonsis said he can be thoughtful about the process and find a way to “make an offer that makes sense for everybody.”
“Now, the Nationals and the Lerner family have said the team is not for sale, right?” Leonsis said. “It’s not a formal process. And that is true. So there’s obviously no rush by them. They’re enjoying the season, right? They’re defying expectations right now. They have a great team that’s a .500 team — no one expected that. … I keep talking about big markets and big budgets. They’ve proven that wrong.”
