Photo by photopete

Good morning, Washington. Well, they did it. The Nationals signed Stephen Strasburg for a cool $15.1 million, marking a new record in baseball for payments to amateur drafees, and finally allowing the Lerners to argue that they are willing to invest in this team after all. The Post’s Chico Harlan has the blow by blow of how the deal went down yesterday, including the near last-minute, 11:58 p.m. offer and the reaction from Mike Rizzo. To wit: “The Lerner family stepped up here and gave us the resources to sign the most lucrative amateur player contract in the history of the draft. That says a big statement to the city of Washington, D.C., and to the commitment that the Lerner family has to winning championships here in Washington,” Rizzo said. Now there’s a sentence we never imagined might be attributed to the Lerners. We’ll hopefully have more on the Strasburg deal later in the day.

Youth Center Vandalized: The Life Pieces to Masterpieces youth center in Northeast was heavily vandalized in the last couple of days, NBC4 reports in a featured video. For some context, compare the images of the trashed center in the NBC4 video with this WETA neighborhoods feature on Life Pieces to Masterpieces. Contact information to volunteer or support the center can be found here.

Metro Ridership Down in July: The Examiner takes a look at Metro ridership and notices a decline last month, which is especially noteworthy given that the system set an all time ridership record during the same month last year. The article links the decline to the aftermath of the deadly June 22 Red Line crash.

Briefly Noted: Teen girl struck by bullet in her Southeast D.C. home … Fairfax County high school coach arrested in online sex sting … Police searching for missing Silver Spring man.

This Day in DCist: Last year we got a taste of Jonas Brothers mania, and two years before that we worried that our city’s bike trails were becoming too congested.