TEAM FOR SALE.(The Talk of the Town)

Except for a long hiatus from 1972 until this year, the nation's capital was always a baseball town. In the eighteen-eighties, fans packed a stadium called Swampoodle Grounds to cheer the Washington Statesmen--a nickname that in the Gilded Age came close to mockery. By the nineties, the Statesmen had given way to the Senators. Though still faintly satiric, this was a better name, because senators are something Washington reliably, ex officio, has.

In 1901, the National League Senators having folded, the nascent American League, eager for the prestige of a presence in the Federal City, cobbled together a new version from the remains of the disbanded Kansas City Blues. The reborn Washington Senators had a few good years, but their customary dwelling place was the cellar. By 1955, they had become enough of a joke to inspire the hit musical "Damn Yankees," the premise of which was that only a deal with the Devil could put them back up on top. After the 1971 season, they fled to a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, becoming the Texas Rangers and, a couple of decades after that, making plausible the political career of George W. Bush.

This year, the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals, and baseball returned to Freedom's Home Town. The Nats turn out to be a hell of a team. In June, they won twenty of twenty-six games. Ah, Washington: no longer first in war, definitely not first in peace, but five games up in the National League East. You gotta have heart.

As it happens, the Nationals was the official name of the Senators for most of their history, from 1905 to 1956, but the fans never took to it. It might stick this time--a third of a century wipes away a lot of sentiment. But, if it again proves unpopular, perhaps the team can be renamed the Washington Lobbyists, to reflect more up-to-date power realities.

Or maybe just the Washington Republicans. Major League Baseball, which has owned the team since 2002, is currently considering bids for it from eight syndicates. One of them includes George Soros, and this has brought certain politicians charging out of the dugout, bats swinging. "I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes," Tom Davis, the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, which oversees the District of Columbia, among other entities, told Roll Call, a Capitol Hill weekly. Baseball teams, he added darkly, "enjoy all sorts of exemptions," notably from antitrust laws. "We finally got a winning team," he elaborated in a chat with the Times. "Now they're going to hand it over to a convicted felon who wants to legalize drugs and who lives in New York and spent five million dollars trying to defeat the President?"

Actually, Soros does not want to legalize drugs, though he backs the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes a "harm reduction" alternative to the failed policies of mass incarceration and militarized prohibition. He is a "convicted felon"--but in France, a detail that has caused cognitive dissonance at places like Fox News. It's an insider-trading case, still on appeal, and is based on some seventeen-year-old alleged dealings that would be unremarkable in the United States. (By contrast, our own George Steinbrenner, owner of those damn Yankees, is a felon of impeccably American lineage--convicted for illegal campaign contributions to one Republican President, Richard Nixon, and pardoned by another, Ronald Reagan.)

Davis's most outrageous charge is that Soros spent five million dollars trying to defeat President Bush. It was closer to twenty-five million. And this, of course, is his real offense. Only when Soros got involved in the 2004 campaign did he ...