OPINION:

Monumental Sports and Entertainment boss Ted Leonsis is still banging the drum to buy the Washington Nationals.

“I’m unabashed; I want to buy the MLS team. I want to buy the baseball team,” Leonsis, who owns the Washington Wizards, Capitals and Mystics, told CNBC last week. “Not for ego, (but) for the fans, because those teams will struggle to compete against the Yankees and the Dodgers but if we can take those teams and plug them into the platform, and they can operate with excellence as a team and we handle all the top line, I think it will make them more competitive and that’s what fans are looking for.”

So all Leonsis would have to do with the Nationals is to “plug them into the platform.”

I’m assuming this is the Monumental Sports and Entertainment platform.

If that’s all it takes, maybe someday he can “plug” the Wizards into that platform and they can operate “with excellence as a team” instead of a perennial bottom-feeder in the NBA.

The Nationals’ owners, the Lerner family, announced they were exploring the sale of the baseball franchise in 2022, only to change their minds — despite a $2 billion offer from Leonsis, according to the Washington Post — in a 2024 announcement.

“We talk all the time,” Leonsis said of the Lerners (Mark Lerner is a minority investor in Monumental Sports and Entertainment). “It takes two to tango, and they’re not ready to sell; they want to wait to see what happens with baseball.”

Leonsis can tango, fox trot or jitterbug all he wants with the Lerners. He has a bigger roadblock that all but assures he won`t be purchasing the Nationals, whether the Lerners want to sell or not — baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.

The commissioner has plans for the future of television broadcasting for individual teams, and those plans likely don’t include Leonsis’ Monumental Network — which would be the main reason Leonsis would have interest in buying the baseball team.

For Leonsis, 162 Nationals games are Gilligan’s Island reruns for his network.

Last week at the Front Office Sports “Tuned In” conference, Manfried said he expects to consolidate all local broadcast rights by 2028. 

Currently, Major League Baseball is handling the local broadcasts of seven teams, plus partially responsible for an eighth team. 

You can be sure he is counting on the Nationals – and likely the Baltimore Orioles as well — to add to that group.

Once the season ends, the Nationals will finally be free of the control over their television rights by the Orioles-owned Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) after 20 years of a volatile deal. 

The Nationals were forced into the agreement, the price the late Orioles owner Peter Angelos demanded for the relocation of the Montreal Expos to the District, which he claimed was his territory, using false data to exaggerate the impact a baseball team in Washington would have.

“After this term, the Nationals will be free to explore alternatives for their television rights for the 2026 season and beyond,” MLB announced in March. “As part of the settlement, all disputes related to past media rights between the Nationals, Orioles and MASN have been resolved, and all litigation will be dismissed.”

That surrender by all parties didn’t happen through a newfound friendship between the two franchises. 

Informed speculation has been that MLB will want a quid pro quo for finally getting Washington out of MASN. 

That likely means the Nationals joining Manfred’s group of teams with television rights distributed by MLB.

There have been reported discussions between the Nationals and MASN about a new agreement with the network for the Washington franchise. That seemed unlikely before and more so now with Manfred’s public statements about gathering local team television rights under MLB’s control — where the Orioles will probably wind up as well.

Where Manfred’s plan winds up is uncertain. 

He hopes to convince the handful of teams still with lucrative regional television networks — the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and Cubs — to join the MLB group he is assembling. To do that, though, Manfred is expected to seek a salary cap concession from the players union. That is unlikely with a capital “U.” The current labor agreement expires Dec. 1, 2026, and without a new deal a lockout and work stoppage will follow.

But before that, the commissioner will probably have most of his television ducks in a row. Expect the Nationals to go quack quack.

• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.