Mayor Barry, The Cock Who Crowed

The Washington Post has an excellent story on the backroom stadium dealings over the past week. It's full of lots of good info and juicy stories -- all of which have been missing from the picture we've seen.

It's all under the headline "Barry Moved To Block Stadium" and starts with some heated political blather from the former Mayor. I thought this was going to be a story about the cock who took credit for making the sun rise each day, but it gets better:

Thursday, he summoned Brown, David A. Catania (I-At Large), Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) and Vincent C. Gray (D-Ward 7) to a meeting in his fourth-floor office at the John A. Wilson Building. Williams and his advisers joined them, Barry said, and Williams's aides confirmed.

Barry said yesterday that he had intended for D.C. entrepreneur Jonathan Ledecky, who is one of eight bidders trying to buy the Washington Nationals, to present a plan Ledecky had agreed to with Barry. If baseball sold Ledecky the Nationals, Barry said, Ledecky had agreed to cover cost overruns on the stadium and give African Americans a 40 percent equity stake in the team.

But Barry said he was told by Ledecky's adviser, Frank Smith Jr., a former D.C. Council member, that baseball officials had gotten wind of the plan and told Ledecky to make no such offer. According to several council members in the room, Stephen M. Green, the mayor's top adviser on baseball issues, acknowledged he had tipped off baseball officials.

Furious, Barry accused Green of sabotaging the deal, and the meeting broke up without further discussion, several people at the meeting said.

"I went off," Barry said. "This was too delicate a thing to call MLB."

Essentially, Barry was prepared to tell baseball Ledecky or the highway. Reading the tea leaves, and assuming that Barry knows how MLB operates (a big assumption, I know!) he essentially gave MLB the choice of the highway or the highway. There's no way the city would let Barry dictate their choice at this point; Barry had to have known that, which is why his strategy is disingenuous, at best.

The story notes that Brown, Gray, and Mendelson never actually agreed to the arrangement, but that the idea of someone else picking up the cost overruns is what's so attractive about the idea.

It's pretty clear that MLB has overplayed its hand. There was talk that just a simple IOU letter from the Feds to cover the cost of Metro improvements would be enough to sneak the lease through, but the anti-stadium crowd is getting more vocal.

The Council is set to meet right after the New Year, and it's highly unlikely that things will be ready to go by then. The bonds were technically supposed to be in place by the end of the year, but as we've discussed before, there aren't any penalties until two years after the deadline -- and even then, the penalties amount to zippo.

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One more thought...

The team isn't going to leave (at least based on these developments). While we think of MLB itself owning the team, it's important to remember that it has 29 other shareholders. The Royals and Blue Jays, for example, have opened their wallets this season in an attempt to create some excitement around their franchises. It's awfully convenient that it's happening in a year where they're set to make $15 million or so thanks to the sale of the team, huh? Selig works by consensus, and $15 million is a lot for David Glass to concede.