In January, the Nationals began processes to sell the naming rights to their stadium and find a sponsor for jersey patches, reports Brett Night of Forbes. Chief revenue officer Mike Carney told Night that the team is hopeful to announce those partnerships midseason.
Chelsea Janes of The Washington Post wrote last August about the Nats’ desire to reach those agreements. She noted at the time that the Nationals were the only team that had neither a stadium rights deal nor jersey sponsorships.
The change is only really relevant to fans in the sense that it could impact the team’s spending habits. Forbes estimates that the deals — which will be negotiated separately, likely with different sponsors — could come with upwards of $20MM in additional revenues annually. Carney loosely alluded to that possibly having an effect on payroll. “We want to be that brand that is a consistent winner year in and year out, and this is going to help to do that,” he told Night.
The Nats have never had a ballpark naming rights agreement. The venue has been known as Nationals Park since its opening in 2008. The Nationals are one of eight teams that doesn’t have a corporate sponsor for its stadium. The Dodgers, Angels, Red Sox, Cubs, Yankees, Orioles and Royals are the others. That doesn’t include the A’s (Sutter Health Park) and Rays (George M. Steinbrenner Field), who are in temporary homes for at least the upcoming season.
While the process has been ongoing since January, the Forbes report comes the same day as the Nationals finally settled their longstanding battle with the Orioles over the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. The Washington organization can pursue its own in-market broadcasting opportunities after the 2025 season. That should position them to lock in a more reliable television revenue stream for ’26 and beyond.
The Nationals pushed their competitive balance tax payrolls into the $200MM range each season between 2017-19, according to the Cot’s Baseball Contracts estimates. They’ve dramatically cut spending since winning the World Series six years ago. That coincided with an unsuccessful attempt by the Lerner family to sell the franchise in 2022-23. It has overlapped with a five-year rebuild that saw the team trade Juan Soto, Trea Turner and Max Scherzer in blockbusters to restock the farm system. Between the returns in those trades and the selection of Dylan Crews with the second overall pick in 2023, the Nats have built an encouraging core.
It doesn’t seem they feel that relatively young group is quite ready to take the next step. They shied away from anything more than affordable two-year commitments this offseason. Their estimated $137MM luxury tax payroll (via RosterResource) isn’t meaningfully different from last year’s $140.6MM year-end mark. Owner Mark Lerner justified the relatively quiet winter by opining that the team was probably still a season away from being a true contender.
“When (GM Mike Rizzo) calls me in and says, ‘We really need to think about it,’ for next winter, we’ll talk about it,” Lerner said last month. “Right now, he doesn’t think — and I agree with him: There’s no point in getting a superstar and paying him hundreds of millions of dollars to win two or three more games. You’ve got to wait until — like Jayson [Werth]. Jayson was right on the cusp of [the team] being really good, and it took us to the next level. That’s the ideal situation.“