WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A year ago this week, Mark Lerner made a brief announcement: His family, he told The Washington Post, was taking down the “For Sale” sign they hung on the Washington Nationals in the spring of 2022, saying that “it’s not the time or the place for it.”

On Monday morning, as he sat in a golf cart alongside one of the Nationals’ practice fields at their sprawling spring training complex, Lerner said that it’s still not the time or the place for a sale — and that his family is committed to owning the team for the foreseeable future.

“Our commitment is to continue to go forward,” Lerner said in an interview. A sale is “not on the list of things we worry about. We’re excited about the team. We worked too hard to get it, and we love what we’re doing with it. And so, unless something different happens along the way, we’re in it for the long haul.”

People will parse those words because Lerner, private by nature, doesn’t speak publicly often. Since the brief exchange last spring training in which he said he and his family — which includes his wife, his two sisters and their husbands — had decided against selling, he hadn’t commented about the family’s commitment to stewarding the Nationals going forward.

So among the questions Monday: What changed?

“I think it got blown up a little bit,” Lerner said of the family’s intention to sell. “We were just seeing what’s out there, seeing if there was anything that would work for us — not in selling, necessarily. You could sell pieces of [the team], too. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t worth the aggravation of having more partners and all that. So we kept it, and we’re working hard to work out all the issues — MASN and everything else.”

Oh, that: MASN, the regional sports network that has broadcast the Nationals’ games since their inaugural season of 2005, is still controlled by the Orioles. The teams continue to bicker about rights fees in court, the latest being legal maneuvering to ensure the Nationals receive the $320 million an MLB panel awarded them for 2022 to 2026. Because the sides are still in court, Lerner said he couldn’t comment on the process, other than to say he’s hopeful there’s a solution forthcoming.

On the field, there are questions all around. This is the 20th anniversary season of baseball’s return to Washington. The Lerners, who bought the team from MLB for $450 million after it moved the Montreal Expos to D.C., took control of the franchise in the middle of the 2006 season.

Lerner said he envisions a trajectory similar to what those nascent Nationals went through: years of losing that led to years of winning. In the five-year stretch from 2006 to 2010, only the Pittsburgh Pirates lost more games than the Nats. But from 2012 to 2019 — a period in which the Nationals made five postseason appearances and won the World Series — only the Los Angeles Dodgers won more regular season games.

Lerner said he believes the struggles the Nationals have endured recently — from 2020 to 2024, no team lost more games — could be a precursor to a sustained run of contention in the near future.

“It’s painful, but I understand the process better than I did even the first time around and what you have to do to build it the right way,” Lerner said. “There’s no point in being like what [the Florida Marlins were] in the early 2000s. One day, they’re selling off the team. And the day before, they won the World Series.

“We want to get a team where one person has to be replaced for next season, like Kansas City in football. That’s where I think we want to be, that it’s just plug-and-play and we’ll be good for seven, eight, nine, 10 years. I think that still makes a lot of sense for where we are.”

During the period when the Nationals annually expected to contend, they spent money on players. They signed homegrown star Ryan Zimmerman to a pair of long contract extensions that helped keep him a National for life, then delved deep into the free agent pool by offering outfielder Jayson Werth a seven-year, $126 million deal heading into the 2011 season — before they were truly ready to contend.

They later lured Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Max Scherzer with a seven-year, $210 million contract and signed fellow ace Stephen Strasburg to a seven-year, $175 million deal before he reached free agency. Even after the World Series title, they brought back Strasburg — who exercised an opt-out clause after becoming the World Series MVP — on a seven-year, $245 million whopper.

That kind of spending put the Nationals in the top 10 in MLB payroll in seven of the eight seasons from 2014 to 2021. But since the summer of 2021, when they began a purge of veterans in trades for prospects, they haven’t signed a player to a significant multiyear deal. According to Spotrac, their 2025 payroll ranks them 24th of 30 teams — and that includes money being paid to Strasburg, who retired because of injury. The New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves — all National League East rivals — rank first, third and eighth in payroll.

The question, then, after back-to-back 71-win seasons: If Mike Rizzo, the team’s general manager since 2009, and his staff believed it was time to swing for a nine-figure contract, would the Lerners provide the funds to go for it?

“When Mike calls me in and says, ‘We really need to think about it,’ for next winter, we’ll talk about it,” Lerner said. “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. 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. It’s always on our mind.”

He paused. “You could get nauseous thinking about it,” he said, laughing.

On the fields around him, the Nats of the present and future — Dylan Crews, James Wood, CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore, Jake Irvin — went through drills and batting practice. The first full-squad workout was Tuesday. Lerner talked about his excitement when the Nationals won the lottery and secured the top pick in the June draft. There are more prospects on the way.

His family, he said, is here to stay.

“Soon, we’ll have it where we want it to be,” Lerner said. “And we’ve got a great team that’s going to be here soon.”