Mark Lerner Loses His Appetite For Sentiment, Pulls The Plug On Stephen Strasburg’s Retirement Send-Off

It was the Washington Nationals organization that reportedly initiated conversations with disabled former pitcher Stephen Strasburg over the summer about finally formally announcing the top of his baseball profession at a team press conference, scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 9. The plan, as sketched out by the Nationals, agreed to by Strasburg, after which leaked to the press in late August, was for Strasburg to eventually have his jersey number retired in a 2024 ceremony, and, crucially, for Strasburg to be paid the rest of what’s due within the seven-year contract extension he signed with the Nationals soon after winning the 2019 World Series. That detail, of who got the ball rolling on this deal, winds up being a vital one: Thursday afternoon the Nationals suddenly postponed the retirement press conference and it was reported by multiple outlets that the team has had second thoughts about just how much of that contract extension they’re willing to pay out.

This appears to be a part of a general and severe tightening of organizational purse strings by the Nationals. The Lerner family, led by Nationals principal owner Mark Lerner, is actively hunting around for an elusive buyer. Without anything like a long-term commitment from ownership, the Nationals have shifted from one among the highest handful of biggest spenders during their years of contention to the sixth-cheapest roster in baseball this season. Just lower than half of their total payroll commitment for the 2023 season’s lively roster goes to washed-up pitcher Patrick Corbin, whose $140 million deal from 2018 was one among the ultimate big free agency moves of the team’s temporary era of paying market price for good players. Expensive home-grown veterans, after receiving lowball offers with salary payments deferred off into the distant future, have either walked in free agency or been actively forged off in exchange for affordable prospects. The team today is a shell. An intriguing shell with some interesting youths, but one which is designed principally to cost as little as possible.

The Nationals have never been a revenue juggernaut, but they were consistently up in the highest half of the league by average attendance once they were any good. Last season’s miserable outfit, which sucked powerfully even before trading away Juan Soto, finished seventeenth. This season, when the Nationals have all but formally announced that they like losing to winning, they’ve fallen into the league’s bottom third. Business is not great. Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic told an area sports radio program Thursday that the Lerners are “writing personal checks” from their very own vast stores of personal wealth as a way to fund the team’s operations, a favourite boo-hoo story from ownership that someway misses the purpose that the usage of private resources to support an expert sports team is your entire point of getting an investor owner in the primary place. The Lerners bought the Nationals from Major League Baseball in 2006 for $450 million, and in 2022 reportedly turned down a suggestion of no less than $2 billion from a would-be purchaser, so their investment has worked out just positive. Nevertheless, Mark Lerner has reached the boundaries of his family’s interest in using Lerner Enterprises money to pay for baseball, and that now becomes everyone else’s problem.

The Nationals reached a contract extension with lame-duck World Series-winning manager Davey Martinez in August, but team president and longtime chief personnel honcho Mike Rizzo has been in tortured negotiations with Lerner all summer, with no sign of ending. That situation is getting dicey: The Washington Post and The Athletic reported that the Nationals this week suddenly gutted the team’s scouting department, cutting loose greater than a dozen pro and international scouts and a handful of special assistants, most of whom were hired by Rizzo in 2022 when he made a selected priority of rebuilding the team’s hollowed-out scouting operation following a downsizing through the acute phases of the pandemic. These latest cuts come about per week after Washington’s respected international scouting director, Johnny DiPuglia, suddenly resigned; although no reason has been formally announced, Bob Nightengale reported Thursday that DiPuglia resigned after the Nationals approached him about reducing his salary.

So the Nationals typically don’t appear to be an outfit that will suddenly be super cool with the thought of paying some large portion of a $245 million commitment, much less to someone who isn’t any longer employable as an expert baseball player. Strasburg’s playing contract runs through 2026, but salary deferments—a favourite maneuver of the cheapskate Lerners designed to lower their near-term salary commitments and shift to their employees any consideration of the time value of cash—run through 2029. The Nationals owe one other roughly $97 million in deferred money to a handful of players—Jon Lester and Rafael Soriano proceed to haunt Washington’s payroll just like the spirits of the damned—and that is all debt that might be passed onto the team’s next eventual owner, possibly dampening enthusiasm amongst prospective buyers. We have not even gotten to the part where the Nationals are knotted with the Baltimore Orioles in a lengthy lawsuit over revenue from MASN, the teams’ insanely shitty shared regional sports network.

The first hint that the Nationals may not be prepared to provide Strasburg the massive make-whole send-off that was earlier reported got here Wednesday, when Rizzo told an area radio show that Strasburg would “receives a commission for [the remainder of his existing] deal until he comes to a decision on what his future’s going to be.” This might appear to be an odd thing to say roughly 72 hours before a scheduled press conference to announce a call that was made after which shared with the press weeks earlier. If the Nationals were still waiting on Strasburg to make some decision about his future, what precisely could be the substance of the presser? Evidently that very same query occurred to someone with the Nationals, and the next day the press conference was canceled. Nightengale reported that somebody with the Nationals reached out to Strasburg’s agent, Scott Boras, with the news that the team had abruptly modified its mind about Strasburg’s money.

For now, Strasburg is officially an lively player, though he’ll almost actually never pitch again. For now, the Nationals are officially owned by the Lerners, though they’ll almost actually never again accept the responsibilities entailed by that arrangement. Every thing else is in limbo.