As a boy, Ted Lerner worked the scoreboard at grand old Griffith Stadium, where the Senators played.
Lerner, now 80, will once again be a regular at D.C. baseball games — this time as the owner.
As expected, Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that a group led by Lerner and former Atlanta Braves President Stan Kasten will take control of the Nationals. Lerner is the patriarch of a Bethesda-based real estate clan.
Lerner was a 21-year-old law student studying on the G.I. Bill when his father died in 1946. To help his mother pay the bills, Lerner took a part-time job selling houses. He was given a list of 25 houses that his boss couldn’t sell.
“It was the middle of November,” Lerner recalled in a 2003 interview with Washingtonian magazine. “I had one house completely wrapped in cellophane with a huge red bow.”
By the end of that first weekend, he’d sold 100 houses.
In 1960, Lerner went on to develop the then-innovative shopping mall, transforming “a pile of dirt” into Wheaton Plaza.
“By the late 1980s,” Washingtonian wrote in inducting Lerner into its business hall of fame in 2003, “one could assume that every adult in Washington had probably lived, worked or shopped in a building developed by Ted Lerner.”
By putting up $450 million, the Lerner family has bought a team that Forbes magazine considers the sixth-most valuable in baseball.
