Nationals owner Ted Lerner dies at 97
Ted Lerner, owner of the 2019 World Series champion Washington Nationals, has died at 97. According to team spokesperson Jennifer Mastin Giglio, Lerner died Sunday at his Chevy Chase, Maryland, home of complications from pneumonia.
Lerner, a real estate tycoon, was born in 1925, one year after the Washington Senators won the World Series, the last one the city would see until 2019. He was a fan of the team as a child and became an usher at Griffith Stadium (the Senators' home park) because he could almost never afford to buy tickets. He was able to attend the 1937 All-Star Game because, as he told the Washington Post, his ticket was discounted to three cents because he was a student.
He started his real estate company, Lerner Enterprises, in 1952 thanks to a $250 loan from his wife, Annette, and it is now the largest private real estate developer in the Washington, D.C., area, having built more than 20,000 homes.
Lerner bought the Nationals in 2006 for $450 million, nearly all of which was his own money. It was the first time baseball had been back in D.C. since 1971, when the Senators moved to Arlington to become the Texas Rangers. The new Nationals had been the Montreal Expos until 2004, when it was announced they would be moved to D.C. for the 2005 season.
In their first few years, the Nationals were very much like the Senators from the early 1900s: bad. (Though they were a bad team with a shiny, new stadium, as Nationals Park opened in 2008 following two years of Lerner-monitored construction.) Things began to turn around in 2011, two years after Lerner appointed Mike Rizzo as general manager. That was the first year since 2005 that the team finished at or around .500.
From there, the Nationals went to the playoffs five times in the next eight years, winning the National League East four times, and they finally won the first World Series championship in the history of the franchise in 2019. Lerner retired as managing principal owner in 2018 and turned over the day-to-day operation of the team to his son, Mark Lerner, but he was on stage when the World Series trophy was given.
Lerner is survived by his wife, Annette, and their three children, nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
