The business dynamics of running a baseball team is almost always at odds with the demands of fans. What many Washington Nationals fans want is an indication from team ownership to show they are invested in this team for the long-term, and they judge that in spending. Will they show up if the team spends?

Attendance is dropping from even the pathetic levels of 2025 for the Washington Nationals — at a time when the team was winning in the 2026 season. In fact, the team hired a President of Business Operations, Jason Sinnarajah, and you would think he could make a difference. Just another indication of how poorly the DMV, as a whole, supports baseball in Washington.

After a 3-game sweep of the Cincinnati Reds, the talk on the Nationals should be positive at the moment. On the most popular sports radio show in D.C. on Monday morning, the talk started positive and ended in the negative with the message “I don’t have confidence” in this team. These are the voices that have been amplified at fans and would-be fans for years. Even in the winning years, they waited for the other shoe to drop. How do you build fans in this type of environment?

When the Nats would get bounced from the playoffs, the next day was doom and gloom. Trust me, it isn’t like this in every other sports town. Heck, listen to the way these same guys talk about the Washington Wizards. You wouldn’t know the Wizards were last place the past 3-years with winning percentages of .207, .220, and .183. They even raised ticket prices in that timeframe.

Capacity for a Wizards game is 20,356, and they averaged 16,106 per game or 79.1 percent of capacity. While their attendance was bad in NBA terms, somehow they were still getting fans to show up. The Nats are averaging 23,539 this season, but in a stadium that has a capacity of 41,373. That is 56.9 percent full.

We asked AI for ticket prices. The average cost for a Washington Nationals ticket ranges from about $37 to $46 for standard face-value and general admission. An individual single-game ticket for a Washington Wizards game generally costs an average of $90 to $200. Wait for it….Forbes says the Nationals revenue was $300 million last year while the Wizards was $389 million. How can that be? The Wizards have 41 home games and the Nationals play 81 home games. Forbes says the Wizards operating profit was $135 million compared to the Nats at a $15 million loss. Again, this is Forbes reporting all of this.

There isn’t an MLB team, not even the Dodgers are turning a profit of $135 million. That seems excessive what the Wizards are making. They are a luxury item. Baseball has always been an affordable option. But MLB has other problems. The NBA is printing money. On average, NBA teams only trail the NFL in valuations. The Wizards, per Forbes, are worth $4.7 billion. Much more than double their valuation of $2.15 billion of the Nats.

Baseball is economically broken, and to make it worse, they have a big problem looming in a threatened work stoppage. Baseball is in trouble in many ways. The Washington Nationals might be the perfect case study of not knowing how to fix their own problems.

There are only seven teams with lower attendance than the Nationals this year. All small market teams. Maybe the only surprise is that the Nats are just ahead of the Orioles in attendance.

For me, the real surprise is the Milwaukee Brewers attendance of 33,537 per game on average. They are 12th in all of baseball. Yes, they are in first place, the smallest market team in baseball, and last year had the same payroll as the Nats. And the Brewers get revenue sharing. Last year, they were one of the most profitable teams in baseball per Forbes making $47 million. So they don’t spend much, they win a lot, and their fans still support them? They have a population of 1.6 million and the next smallest team is Cleveland at 2.1 million. Washington is 5.4 million.

Population matters, sure, but there are other dynamics in-play here. Milwaukee sports radio loves the Brewers. They don’t talk about their payroll or the fact they could spend much more since they have the profits. That is their team. There is that Wisconsin pride. Whatever they are doing, they quietly have the best record in MLB and are ahead of the Dodgers. Could the Brewers win the World Series this year? Who knows. But they are winning at the turnstiles and in the wallet. And they could easily have spent on better players and did not. Again, the Brewers have made the playoffs every year since 2018 except for 2022.

Here’s another fact, the Brewers are averaging 33,537 fans this year. The Nats best year since the Lerners bought the team was in 2013 at 32,746. That was the best of times. More than a dozen years in the rearview mirror. Downhill from there.

It seems the blueprint for the MLB business should be the Brewers. They’ve made two runs since 2018 to the NL Championship Series and lost both. They do it on low payrolls and achieve the best attendance in the sport based on their percentage of population. While 33,537 of a 1.6 million population doesn’t sound great, it’s incredible. That’s a 2.1 percent of their population attends a Brewers game on average. If the Nats hit that percentage, they’d have to make the stadium the size of Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan that has an official capacity of 107,601.

As we hope the Nationals will spend more. We don’t have the answers. It is more of hope. The team looks like Paul Toboni fixed the foundation. Next is making changes to better the MLB team. The quick fix is spending in free agency. Will they? Those radio talking heads have no confidence. We heard the same from 2006-2010 when the team finally inked a deal for over $100 million.

But the Brewers are doing it quietly and in a different way. No big free agents, and they are making the playoffs nearly at the same pace as the Dodgers. Yes, the difference is championship rings. There has to be a way to do both in winning and the right amount of spending.

That is what the Lerners and Toboni have to do. The Nationals do not have a starting rotation like either of those teams. The quick fix is spending in free agency. On Friday, we suggested that the team spend their entire offseason budget to get Tarik Skubal. He is the modern Max Scherzer or as close as you will get to that. Get him, and who knows. Why not us?