WUSA Sports Director Brett Haber has an exclusive interview with former Nationals GM Jim Bowden.
The interview will be shown in two parts on tonight’s and Thursday night’s 11 p.m newscasts. A complete, nearly hour-long version of the interview can be seen on the station’s Web site Friday morning.
Bowden resigned amid a controversy that he and longtime assistant José Rijo are under federal investigation for the 2006 signing of a 16-year-old prospect named Esmailyn González, who turned out to have faked both his age (by four years) and his name. González, whose real name is Carlos Daniel Alvarez Lugo, received a $1.4 million signing bonus, the largest of its kind given by the Nationals.
Bowden has maintained his innocence since the story broke early this year.
Haber told me that he pursued Bowden for an interview since he resigned from the Nationals before the start of the season.
Bowden agreed to the interview and the two sat down for the one-on-one in Los Angeles last week.
Some of the highlights of the Haber-Bowden interview are:
Bowden’s admission that he never visited the Dominican in his entire tenure as the General Manager of the Nationals. That he felt that his career as a baseball executive was likely over after what happened in Washington and that he hoped to return to the game as a broadcaster.
Haber asked Bowden that if a quote from a un-named baseball executive that: If you got all of Jim Bowden’s enemies together you would have to rent Yankee Stadium was true?
Bowden replied: “I don’t know. How many people does Yankee Stadium hold?”
It should be a very interesting interview.
