D10 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
sitting b ack and doing it for recog-
nition.”Patience rewarded
Pursuing something for recog-
nition is actually counter to how
Lerner conducts himself. He de-
clined to be interviewed for this
story and over the years has spo-
ken rarely — and in almost no
detail — about how his team func-
tions. Developing a mall can ben-
efit the public, but it is a private
pursuit. Selig long has referred to
baseball as a “social institution.”
Explaining the family’s thinking
publicly is an aspect of ownership
Lerner has avoided.
“There’s really nothing like the
business of sports,” s aid Mark At-
tanasio, a financier who bought
the Brewers in late 2004. “Every-
thing you do is under a micro-
scope. Imagine being on Wall
Street and making all these deals
over the course of a day and then
at the end of the day having to
explain all your decisions publicly.
That’s t he position Te d found him-
self in. It’s a transition for all of us.”
Lerner has left the explaining
to others — even in the early days.
During his time as the team’s
president, Kasten was the most
prominent forward-facing figure,
but when he departed, he wasn’t
replaced. Mark Lerner writes let-
ters to the fan base following
major decisions and occasionally
speaks for the family in inter-
views. But since he became the
club’s p ermanent general manag-
er in 2009, Rizzo most often out-
lines the team’s thinking — even
though such decisions have been
reached through discussions
with the family. Last year, Te d
Lerner transferred official stew-
ardship of the club to Mark. But
the patriarch’s v oice still m atters.
“He’s the type of leader that
allows you to voice your opinion —
and sometimes vehemently voice
your opinion,” Rizzo said. “He
wants your true outlook and your
true opinion and d oes not want to
hear what you think he wants to
hear.”
From 2006 to 2010, only one
franchise lost more games than
the Nationals. From 2012 through
this year, only one team has won
more. To a nascent fan base,
reaching the World Series could
have seemed distant, if not impos-
sible. To Ted Lerner, it was some-
thing to build toward at no one
else’s pace but his own. Sports
inherently involve emotions, and
the Lerner family isn’t immune to
them.
“You don’t want to be around
me after a loss,” Mark Lerner said.
Te d Lerner doesn’t ride that
roller coaster. That’s why his joy
Tuesday night mattered so much
to his family, the people who mat-
ter most to him.
“I can’t say that I would ever
have that patience,” Mark Lerner
said. “I don’t think Debbie and
Marla would either. I give him a
lot of credit. That’s very hard to
say, ‘We’re going to continue to do
it the right way whether I’m here
or not.’
“For a man of his age to say,
‘Let’s do it right; you have to be
patient,’ to me it’s e xtraordinary.”
[email protected]FedEx? Why do scouts spend so
much traveling from place to
place? To baseball lifers, such
questions were insulting. But Te d
Lerner wasn’t going to just accept
baseball’s norms until — and un-
less — he understood them.
“He would learn where the pot-
holes are and how to avoid them,”
said Kasten, who served as the
team’s p resident from the t ime the
Lerners took over through the
2010 season. “Sometimes con-
forming is the way to go. Some-
times being contrarian is the way
to go.”
All the while, though, he was
soliciting opinions. Even in his
late 70s, he knew there were other
owners and executives who un-
derstood baseball better than he
did. Lerner picked up the phone
and made the calls to try to figure
it out. He m et f or hours with Scott
Boras, the super agent with whom
he has built a tight relationship
and done several deals because, as
Boras said last week, “He wanted
to hear about the business from
my s ide.”
“I took s everal calls from him i n
those first few years. ‘What’s your
strategy on the minor leagues?
What kind of resources do you put
into ballpark repairs?’ ” s aid Larry
Baer, the CEO of the San Francisco
Giants who is also a part owner.
“He had a very inquisitive, active
mind and wasn’t somebody who’s— not just because they played at
dingy old RFK Stadium and not
just because they were headed to
the first of what would be six
straight losing seasons. The mi-
nor leagues had no prospects. The
scouting and player development
departments h ad the lowest budg-
ets in baseball. As a young man,
Te d Lerner borrowed money from
his wife to buy h is first property —
and become a billionaire. He built
Ty sons Corner. He built White
Flint Mall. He hadn’t built a base-
ball team.
“I think he went in with eyes
wide open that literally the bricks
and mortar of a real estate busi-
ness are hard to translate to a
baseball business,” said Marla
Lerner Ta nenbaum, his younger
daughter. “The chance that’s in-
volved with baseball, the r andom-
ness that can be involved in base-
ball, is not really a big presence in
the real estate business. There are
facts. There are numbers. So I
think the first thing he could real-
ly attack were the numbers, the
financial situation of the fran-
chise that he acquired. He dug
into that.”
The stories from those early
years, as the Lerners learned base-
ball, are part of Nationals lore.
Why did minor league coaches
need stopwatches? Why did each
player need so many bats? Does
this package r eally need to be sentthen baseball’s commissioner,
who invited Te d Lerner to his
office in Milwaukee as part of the
interview process. Lerner, who
also includes sons-in-law Ed Co-
hen and Bob Ta nenbaum in his
businesses and family decision-
making, brought his entire family.
Selig had previously owned the
Milwaukee Brewers, which he
turned into a family business. He
had a strong affinity not only for
local ownership but for family
ownership. Selig’s m entor in base-
ball had been John Fetzer, the late
owner of the Detroit Tigers, a
family guy.
“When Ted came to Milwaukee
with his family, he said, ‘I know
how you felt about Mr. Fetzer,’ ”
Selig said in a phone interview
last week. “He told me he was
going to be my John Fetzer of this
generation. T he only thing I’ll say:
He d idn’t d isappoint me.”A different kind of business
The Lerners officially took con-
trol of the team i n July 2006, and i f
he taught those who worked for
him and others throughout base-
ball about his own family’s i mpor-
tance in the operation, the base-
ball experience reminded h is fam-
ily of his defining characteristic:
patience.
“He’s the most patient person I
know,” Mark Lerner said.
The Nationals were a shamblesin the country, about owning a
team.
“I guess I’m at fault,” Mark said
in an interview Friday at Nation-
als Park that his two sisters joined
by video conference. “ Since I was a
little guy, I always said to my dad,
‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have one of
our own?’ ”
The Lerners made a run at the
Washington Redskins in the late
1990s, when the NFL awarded the
team to Daniel Snyder. They had
monitored the potential moves of
the San Francisco Giants and the
San Diego Padres, disappointed
each time. Mark bought into Ted
Leonsis’s group that owns hock-
ey’s C apitals and basketball’s Wiz-
ards.
Still, to pursue the town’s new
baseball team, Te d and Mark
couldn’t be the only Lerners on
board. “It was kind of a guy thing
at the time,” Debra said. Because
decisions such as this have to be
an everyone thing, the family
wrestled with it. When t hey decid-
ed to move forward, Mark sent
flowers to his sisters.
“He knew we might have a ven-
ture one day that we wanted to
pursue and we’d need his sup-
port,” Debra said.
To get the team, the Lerners
would not only have to pay MLB’s
asking price of $450 million but
also beat out a half-dozen c ompet-
itors. The arbiter was Bud Selig,handful of whom have reached
this point, it’s a professional peak
— with possibility still ahead. For
the fans, so many of whom have
suffered through previous Octo-
ber disappointments — not to
mention 33 years without any
baseball team at a ll — it is a potent
cocktail of adrenaline and emo-
tion. For General Manager Mike
Rizzo and his staff, it is validation
that their methods of scouting,
developing and evaluating play-
ers works.
On the stage, Te d Lerner rev-
eled in a moment that brought a
kind of attention very different
from the opening of a mall or
development of an office building.
“I want to tell our fans: This is for
you,” Lerner said into a micro-
phone, his words carrying out to
those in the stands and a televi-
sion audience beyond.
But for Lerner, the Nats’ pen-
nant is about more than the fans.
When the Nationals themselves
had climbed d own from the make-
shift stage at the center of the
ballfield, the trophy secured,
Lerner remained atop it. Still to
come were the photos he had
waited for. There, then, were his
wife, Annette, and his three chil-
dren, his sons-in-law and daugh-
ter-in-law, h is grandkids.
For Lerner, this was about fam-
ily.
“He’s obviously very accom-
plished and very successful, super
smart, very self-confident,” said
Stan Kasten, the former president
of the Nationals who now over-
sees the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“But he is totally dedicated to
family above all else — above all
else....
“Everything c ame down to how
it worked within his family and
reflected on his family. There’s
nothing more important to Te d
than that.”
That’s h ow the Lerners pursued
a baseball team. That’s how they
have run a baseball team. So that’s
how they celebrated a pennant.
With the Lerners, there are no 5-3
votes. There’s o nly consensus.
“It’s a family dynamic,” Rizzo
said. “We make decisions as a
group. There are no knee-jerk de-
cisions, no snap judgments. It’s a
deliberate process that takes the
knowledge and the support of the
whole family.”
This isn’t how Te d Lerner built
the Nationals. It’s how Te d Lerner
lives his life. He’s so disciplined
that until recently, his longtime
tailor kept the same waist mea-
surement from h is 30s — and now
he has to take them in. He’s so
pious that he won’t attend Friday
night g ames because of the J ewish
Sabbath. Those qualities are re-
flected in his stewardship of the
Nationals.
Family first and last
By the t ime Major League Base-
ball decided to move t he Montreal
Expos to Washington following
the 2004 season, the Lerners had
flirted with sports ownership be-
fore. Mark Lerner thinks he was
probably 8 when he began pester-
ing his father, one of the most
successful real estate developers
LERNER FROM D1
baseball
For Te d Lerner, a family celebration
JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Ted Lerner, with son Mark, said on the stage after the Nationals reached the World Series, “I want to tell our fans: This is for you.”BY SAM FORTIERJuan Soto walked into the
batting cage determined to find
out what was wrong. It was
sometime after midnight follow-
ing Game 3 of the National
League Championship Series
against the St. Louis Cardinals.
The 20-year-old didn’t feel like
the phenom he was; he had
finished hitless in three at-bats
and struck out twice. Soto had
delivered two of the Washington
Nationals’ most crucial hits of the
postseason — the go-ahead single
in the wild-card game and the
game-tying home run in Game 5
of the NL Division Series — but
otherwise he felt as though he
was flailing.
The batting cage at Nationals
Park sits in what looks like an
alcove of the hallway between the
clubhouse and the dugout. But
inside, it’s cavernous with green
carpet cordoned into lanes by
mesh nets. Underneath the
bright lights, the ones that can
make you forget what time it is,
Soto explained to hitting coach
Kevin Long that he suspected his
struggles in the postseason —
7 for 34 (.206) — were caused by
pulling his front hip. Long
agreed; the young star was out in
front of everything.
Hitting obsesses Soto. He con-
siders it a kind of art. He hones
his swing as craft, protects the
batter’s box as though it’s his
property and employs the “Soto
shuffle” — pawing the dirt, lick-
ing his lips, grabbing his crotch —
to intimidate opposing pitchers.
The young Dominican’s bat has
defined him since his graceful
swing and knack for barreling
balls caught the attention of in-
ternational scouts. It’s why the
Nationals gave him a $1.5 million
signing bonus at 16. It’s why he
rocketed through their minor
league system, leapfrogged Class
AAA altogether and debuted in
the majors last year at 19. It’s why
he’ll hit cleanup in the World
Series before his 21st birthday.
The slump robbed Soto of his
swagger. He pressed, lost his
patience and swung at pitchesout of the strike zone that he
would otherwise let go. Long
thought the problem might be
linked to Soto’s September slump
(16 for his last 78, .206). It might,
at its root, go back to his first six
weeks of the season because,
when the young hitter fell out of
rhythm, he suffered those other,
smaller breakdowns.
One thing stuck out to Long:
Pitchers were attacking Soto with
a ton of breaking balls. He strug-gled most against sliders: His
.621 on-base-plus-slugging per-
centage is 300 points lower than
his second-worst pitch. Soto
showed an ability to adjust — he
homered off a slider in Game 5 of
the NLDS — but their movement
wasn’t the most dangerous part.
Soto saw so many breaking pitch-
es he started expecting them, and
that recalibrated his timing from
what Long saw as the ideal. The
coach wants hitters to sit fastball,so they can catch a 100-mph pitch
and react to everything else.
Long set up seven baseballs in
a horizontal line toward Soto at
the plate. The seventh was far-
thest from him; the first was
almost across the plate to the
catcher’s mitt. Long wanted to
counteract Soto’s distorted tim-
ing by heightening his awareness
of where he made contact. That
would recondition his body to
read, react and get the bat barrel
where it needed to be against
different pitches.
On each pitch, Long told Soto,
call out the number — one to
seven — where you contact the
ball.
“Three!” Soto called out on the
first pitch, a fastball.
“No, that was a one,” Long
remembered explaining.
Soto was shocked. The ball got
deeper than he realized because
he prepared for a breaking ball.
Long emphasized gearing up ear-
lier than he thought necessary,and he asked Soto to try for
contact at three or four. Long has
always considered bat control
one of Soto’s strengths, and he
watched as he made the “easy
adjustment” within pitches. Soto
started smacking balls back up
the chute, and Long remembered
Soto’s instant reaction: “Oh, my
God. There it is.”
The whole thing took no lon-
ger than 20 minutes, but when
Soto left the cage, he felt renewed
confidence. Long grinned and
told him to sleep well. They
needed to sweep the Cardinals.
That night, in the first inning
of Game 4, Soto stayed on a
low-and-away sinker and instead
of rolling over it, he flipped it
down the left field line for a
double. He kept the line moving
on what became a seven-run first,
and after he scored, raced over to
Long in the dugout and told him
the swing felt “really, really good.”
He later smoked two more fast-
balls and, though they were
caught, the solid contact encour-
aged him.
The biggest boost came in the
seventh, when the Cardinals’ big
left-hander, Andrew Miller,
threw him a slider down and in. It
was a pitch Soto probably
would’ve managed weak contact
against before. This time, though,
he channeled everything he had
learned hours ago in the cage. He
reacted to the slider, backed up
his contact point and barreled it.
He drilled the ball into right field
for a single. Long saw what any-
one else paying attention did, a
warning sign for all the pitchers
to come. Juan Soto felt he was
back.
[email protected]A late-night visit to the batting cage let Soto find his stroke and confidence
TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST
Juan Soto renewed his focus on contact point, shifting forward and backward depending on the pitch.WORLD SERIES SCHEDULE
Game 1: Tuesday, Washington
at Houston, 8:08, Fox
Game 2: Wednesday, Washington
at Houston, 8:07, Fox
Game 3: Friday, Houston at
Washington, 8:07, Fox
Game 4: Saturday, Houston at
Washington, 8:07, Fox
Game 5: Oct. 27, Houston at
Washington, 8:07, Fox*
Game 6: Oct. 29, Washington at
Houston, 8:07, Fox*
Game 7: Oct. 30, Washington at
Houston, 8:08, Fox*
* if necessary