Play ball! Post Update.

Nats Watch. Bezos Bust.

During the depths of the pandemic, there was one bright spot come spring. Baseball was back! Fans couldn’t actually attend games, but they could watch them on cable. The ballpark seats were occupied by cardboard figures. But the players on the field were for real. Game on!

For Washington Nationals fans — recall that in the distant past, we won the 2019 World Series — it’s been one losing “rebuilding” season after another. Still, I watched the games I did not personally attend, on MASN, the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network.

In order to keep the Baltimore Orioles from nixing the Nats arrival in DC in 2005, ownership agreed to give the O’s most of the MASN proceeds. Years of litigation led to a settlement that freed the Nats from the MASN yoke. Good for fans, right? Wrong.

As the 2026 season approached, the Nats were no longer tethered to MASN, and ownership started promoting Nationals.tv, a streaming service for only $99 a year. Fans whose cable providers formerly included the Nats/MASN as part of their package were suddenly confronted with a new, additional cost. After rolling out Nationals.tv, the news was that cable companies would include the Nats. Whew!

Verizon/Fios, our provider, would offer the Nats games on Channel 579. But the screen kept telling me I wasn’t subscribed. For Nats fans, it was like the Black Screen of Death on a computer. The sh-t hit the fans, and they were furious!

This was not news in the depleted Washington Post, but former Post Sports reporter Spencer Nusbaum (jointly with Evan Drelich) covered it in The New York Times, with the headline: “Frustrated Nationals fans find themselves shut out of watching Opening Day on TV.” My Facebook feed was filled with angry posts from the fans.

Some Fios subscribers were told they needed to pay a $44 more a month to watch the team. Several blamed ownership (the Lerner family) and wrote: Sell the team. A few even threatened to abandon the Nats entirely and switch their allegiance to the Orioles in Baltimore, which could still be viewed on what was left of MASN.

I’ll tell you I was one grumpy geezer! But I was able to listen to the local radio sportscasters, either at 106.7 FM or with my Sirius subscription, which seemed like a throwback to when as a young Yankees fan (I was a kid on Long Island), I listened to the legendary MelAllen (“The voice of the Yankees”). Also, our house here was built by Herb Stein, head of Nixon’s council of economic advisers, and his son, the lawyer-actor-celebrity Ben Stein wrote about his dad listening to Senators ballgames on the radio while sipping beer and sitting on our deck before the team left town.

Finally, having had no success with Verizon/Fios online, I found a customer service number and actually reached a human being. He’d taken 15 angry calls over the weekend. Those asked to pay $44 more had a “lower tier” package, he explained. Time to review my plan, which includes cable, internet and land line. Surprisingly, the land line cost only $30 a month; internet $90, and the rest went to pay for cable and “fees.” For a few dollars more a month, he said, I could watch the Nats and also a few other premium channels and BBC World News, which in these times I sorely missed.

Deal done, we’ve been able to watch Nats games on Channel 579 and, even better,, we went to Nats Park for the middle game of a three-game series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. We were there before the 1:35 scheduled game time, then waited through a 2+ hour rain delay. But any day at the ballpark is a good day. It was not only raining, it was chilly, which gave me an excuse to purchase a new Nats long sleave pullover. From Section 222,, Row T, we had to ascend many steps but had a great view.

In these terrifying timers of Trump, I am grateful beyond words for baseball.

The Nats were actually leading at one point, but the Dodgers won 8-6. With a paltry payroll of $100 million to $400 million for L.A., the Nats were outspent and outplayed by the 2025 World Champs. On the scoreboard where the Washington Post once advertised was Budweiser. The good news was that the Washington Post sports section, obliterated in the Feb. 3 newsroom tsunami, had hired a new Nats reporter, Danielle Allentuck, and she is good! With some laid-off Posties gone to the Baltimore Banner, she had done just the reverse; her last job was covering the Orioles for the online newspaper. With the hockey season almost over, the Post also rehired Bailey Johnson, the Washington Capitals beat reporter who was among the army of laid off staffers.

Otherwise, the Post Sports section is heavily relying on the Associated Press, even for the woeful Washington Wizards, which is perhaps unfortunate as the AP has just announced its own massive cuts in local coverage and has offered 120 buyouts. The move is “toward video and national topics.” AP stories are also heavily represented in the Post’s front news section, since it has laid off most of its foreign staff.

One baseball postscript: In the before times, local sports from night games appeared first online, not in print, where readers were told the contest ended too late to make the paper and were told to find the late game coverage online. But the other night, when the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Nats (in yet another bullpen meltdown), Danielle Allentuck’s story made the print paper but was not online until 9:37 a.m.

More, in what might be just a strange coincidence, the Post grandly announced that Philip Kennicott, its Pulitzer Prize-winning arts and architectural critic, would take on a larger role as the newspaper’s “cultural critic,” writing about many of the institutions, such as the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center, as he had previously that had also been assigned to regular beat reporters who were laid off.

The Atlantic, which has been scooping up displaced Posties, as if rescuing survivors from the life boat of a torpedoed ship, announced on March 16 three more hires from the Post: Sophia Nguyen, who covered news and wrote features for the “sunset” Book World section; Kevin Sieff, a Post foreign correspondent for 15 years; and Jonathan Fischer, the Post’s arts and entertainment editor. And on March 30, four more ex-Posties joined The Atlantic: Kelsey Ables, Janay Kingsberry, Will Oremus, and Matt Viser. Ables covered the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center. Kingsberry “dominated the culture beat nationally.” Oremus “produced authoritative work about technology and the fracturing of reality.” Viser was the Post’s White House bureau chief.

Also, add (or subtract) Natalia Jimenez, the Post’s Senior Photo Editor for International/Climate, has gone to The Wall Street Journal as its Deputy Director of Photography. Makes sense, since The Post fired its entire staff of photographers.

Since the Post didn’t seem interested in keeping this remarkable array of talent, it’s not as though they were poached by other publications. Kind of like the Nats, the team that traded its best players to other major league teams (Soto, Scherzer, Schwarber, Harper, Trea Turner, Anthony Rendon, the list goes on). You could field a World Series-winning team with those traded or sold. Oh yeah, we already did that.

There was a saying, mythical or otherwise, that during the Vietnam war an army officer claimed that U.S. soldiers he commanded had “to destroy the village in order to save it.” That seems pretty much to sum up the strategy, or lack of one, driving the Jeff Bezos-owned Post. Except for this: There is no salvation. There is only destruction.

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