Dignitaries will take shovels in their hands Tuesday and start digging in southeast Washington for the next Maury Wills, Milt Thompson or Emmanuel Burriss.
They will move the first dirt in the District to build the place where the District hopes to re-establish the game’s roots — and maybe produce a few major leaguers who call Washington home.
The official groundbreaking for the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy is scheduled to take place Tuesday morning at Fort Dupont Park.
A youth baseball academy was part of the deal baseball and the city made when the Montreal Expos were relocated to the District in 2005. The Lerner family inherited that promise when they purchased the franchise from Major League Baseball in 2006.
The Washington Nationals Dream Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the franchise established by the Lerners, agreed to donate $1 million for the baseball academy, which is expected to cost as much as $15 million. The baseball team also agreed to contribute $250,000 every year to the operation of the academy, which will also receive money from the city for construction and operating costs.
The facility, according to the Nationals, will operate as a year-round youth development program committed to teaching the fundamentals of baseball and softball while providing afterschool and summer educational programs for youth in neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. It will include three baseball fields and an 18,000 square-foot educational facility featuring classrooms, community rooms, a teaching kitchen and indoor training facilities.
Will the academy have kids all around the District wearing baseball gloves and playing catch? Of course not. There are numerous reasons why baseball has declined as a youth participation sport — particularly among black children — that one baseball academy is not going to repair.
But it is a step in the right direction. The hope is that the establishment and commitment to such a facility increases involvement around the District, where baseball has all but disappeared from the city school system’s athletic programs.
The baseball academy might have happened two years ago, but the project got bogged down in political infighting with the National Park Service over the use of the land at Fort Dupont, which is also home to an ice arena that serves more than 10,000 boys and girls each year in skating education programs.
Marla Lerner Tanenbaum, Ted Lerner’s daughter and one of the co-owners of the Nationals, battled the bureaucracy to get the project to this point — breaking ground to rebuild the foundation of baseball in Washington.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
