Nationals’ Big-League Impact on the DMV

Before teen superstar Bryce Harper burst onto the scene, president mascots raced along the outfield fence and D.C. crowds danced to the tune of “Baby Shark,” the Major League Baseball team now known as the Washington Nationals was situated a little north of the border.

On Sept. 29, 2004, MLB announced that the Montreal Expos would slide into home in the District, bringing baseball back to the nation’s capital for the first time since the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers more than three decades earlier. After a saga that involved a failed league contraction plan and changing ownership, the Expos were renamed the Nationals in November, then played their first season the following year. They competed in RFK Stadium until Nationals Park opened in 2008, attracting crowds of paying fans in the vibrant, redeveloped Navy Yard neighborhood.

Nearly 2 million unique visitors attended games at the park last year, with a quarter of them patronizing retail and restaurants in the area first, according to a report commissioned by the city. Shopping, dining, housing and office space are included in the 2 million square feet of redevelopment in Navy Yard, where the population has skyrocketed 38% since 2010.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the announcement, Maryland Today talked inside baseball with Michael Friedman M.A. ’00, Ph.D. ’08, kinesiology lecturer and author of “Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption”; Mark Hyman, George Solomon Endowed Chair in Sports Journalism and director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism; and Hank Boyd, clinical professor of marketing, to discuss how the move changed the DMV.

Economic Promise
While it’s not hard to conjure arguments against publicly funded sports stadiums like the $600 million Nationals Park project—handouts for wealthy team owners, the gentrification of neighborhoods, etc.—the strongest case for them is the economic development they can spur, Hyman said.

“It brings prosperity to a lot of people. This is really the crux of the matter,” he said. “There are lots of jobs that are created by professional sports because 81 nights a year, you’ve got 20,000 or 30,000 people converging on a ballpark. There are a lot of dollars that are changing hands around a baseball game.”

The construction of Nationals Park in the decaying, formerly industrial Navy Yard neighborhood created a “build it and they will come” kind of buzz, Boyd said.

“For lots of businesses, they were saying, ‘We’re going to build on the multiplier effect of the baseball park,’” he said.

In line with the findings of economists studying the impact of stadiums, Friedman, who wrote his dissertation on the team’s move, suggested that Nationals Park wasn’t the most significant part of the area’s revitalization. In 1995, the Naval Sea Systems Command moved its headquarters to the Navy Yard, and the Department of Transportation announced it would do the same. Five years later, the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative launched to bring mixed-income housing, parks and retail. Those projects, he said, contributed more to the neighborhood’s economic growth.

“The stadium hasn’t been transformative, it hasn’t been a catalyst,” he said. “The key people who are involved in that redevelopment recognize the stadium as being an accelerant. They recognize the stadium as helping the city determine and shift the market in a way that Near Southeast became a neighborhood where people could live and work and play.”

Culture in the Capital
That cultural aspect, the professors agree, has been the biggest benefit of baseball’s return to D.C.

“I definitely think it enhances quality of life in the region, putting aside the public expense,” Friedman said.

While the Nationals started slowly, not posting a winning record until 2012, superstars like two-time Most Valuable Player Harper, Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Max Scherzer and All-Star Juan Soto drew crowds as they helped vault the team to the playoffs in the 2010s.

“To say, ‘We have a team, it’s part of our identity, we follow this group,’ that’s a good thing, that’s a win,” Boyd said.

It’s also been unifying—especially in an area known for political rifts, Hyman said.

“Most years, 2 million fans walk into that ballpark in complete agreement that the home team ought to win that night. It could be the only thing in the District that 2 million people agree on,” he said. “That’s really the beauty of sport, and perhaps the singular beauty of a baseball season: For months and months, divisions and differences kind of melt away, and it’s all about what binds us.”

The Beltway Series
But wait, didn’t the DMV already have a team? Introducing the Nationals with the Orioles just a 40-mile drive up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway added another layer of intrigue to the area’s sports scene.

“There was some anticipation of what it would be like for the region to have competing franchises,” said Hyman, who covered the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992 as a Baltimore Sun reporter.

It’s turned into an annual series, and with the Nats competing in the National League and the O’s in the American League, there’s potential for an eventual Beltway World Series.

“You gotta have a rivalry. That’s where the narrative is,” Boyd said. “You can’t have the Lakers without the Celtics. You just need those stories.”

Championship Mindset
The best example of the team bringing the city together was 2019, when the underdog Nationals beat the Houston Astros in seven games for the team’s first World Series title.

After a dismal 19-31 start to the season, the Nats bounced back to earn a Wild Card berth in the playoffs. They battled through the postseason, upsetting the AL’s top-seeded Astros by winning four games on the road.

“That’s all anybody wanted to talk about in D.C.,” Hyman said. “I can’t remember anybody talking about the budget or some foreign crisis. It was all about whether Stephen Strasburg was going to throw a shutout.”

Added Boyd: “It was just the electricity, the energy, everybody was into it. That whole ‘Baby Shark’ was everywhere,” he said, referencing Washington outfielder Gerardo Parra’s walk-up song that became the city’s unofficial anthem.

Stories like that become part of the city’s lore, Friedman said.

“Nationals fans in 20 years can tell their children, ‘These are the things I remember when the Nationals made their run in 2019,” he said.