Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals will not be sold after nearly two years exploring options, team owner Mark Lerner said.
Lerner announced in April 2022 that it would enter an exploratory process to sell the team, but on Monday he told the Washington Post that the family has opted not to sell the Nationals in a decision made “a while ago.”
“We have determined, our family has determined, that we are not going to sell the team,” Lerner said.
“Nothing has really changed,” he added. “We’ve just decided that it’s not the time or the place for it. We’re very happy owning the team and bringing us back a ring one day.”
The Lerner family bought the Nationals from Major League Baseball in 2006 for $450 million, shortly after the team moved from Montreal, Canada, in 2004 — where they were known as the Montreal Expos.
The Nationals have won four National League East division titles since moving to Washington, D.C., and won the National League pennant and World Series in 2019.
Since the World Series victory in 2019, the team has struggled with a losing record in each of the succeeding seasons and has finished in last place in the National League East for three consecutive seasons.
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The decision comes less than a year after another Washington, D.C.-area professional sports team, the NFL’s Washington Commanders, was sold to an ownership group led by Josh Harris for $6.05 billion.
Two of the city’s other professional sports teams, the NBA’s Wizards and the NHL’s Capitals, are looking to move out of the city to a new arena in Alexandria, Virginia. If the new arena is built for those teams, it would leave the Nationals as the only of the four major sports teams playing within the District of Columbia — at Nationals Park in the Navy Yard neighborhood.
