Baseball returns to D.C.

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Finally, the wait is over.

Washington will regain baseball today after a 33-year absence when Major League Baseball (MLB) is scheduled to announce that the District is the new home of the Montreal Expos, according to several baseball and city sources.

A celebratory press conference, after several schedule changes over the past five days, is hurriedly being planned for 4 p.m. at the City Museum, the sources said. The affair will feature several former Washington Senators players, including Jim Hannan and Chuck Hinton, and will be hosted by local public-relations maven and former Senators public-address announcer Charlie Brotman.

"This seems like it's real this time," said Hannan, president of MLB's Players Alumni Association. "It's been 33 long years. I've been waiting a long time for this."

MLB President Bob DuPuy said that it remains baseball's intention to name the Expos' new home this week and that the District has been the focus of relocation efforts for the past month. But he would not be more specific.

The selection of the District arrives after baseball conducted a formal, two-year courtship of seven candidate areas for the Expos, stretching from greater Washington to Portland, Ore.

The District quickly assumed front-runner status for the Expos because of its clear advantages in population and per capita income, as well as baseball's successful track record with urban ballparks. But it was not until nearly six months ago, when D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams agreed to finance the entire construction of a ballpark using public bonds, that a deal began to grow close.

That revised stance from Mr. Williams manifested itself in a $440million plan that now calls for a stadium to be built in Southeast near the Anacostia River waterfront. The stadium bonds will be paid using a combination of ballpark-related sales taxes, rent payments from the Expos team owner and a gross-receipts tax levied upon large D.C. businesses.

The structure of the stadium deal is widely seen as a major victory for MLB, particularly because of the growing skepticism many cities have toward public financing for sports facilities. But MLB executives successfully used their leverage as the current owners of the Expos, as well as tapping into the significant longing greater Washington has for baseball.

"It's mystified me for a long time how baseball could ignore Washington," Hannan said. "It didn't make any sense, not with the demographics we have here, the size of the TV market and so forth -- and don't forget, you have fans of other teams here from all over the country."