WASHINGTON — Mark Lerner’s first letter to then-commissioner Bud Selig after his family bought the Nationals asked to host the All-Star Game.

“It’s something I’ve wanted from the moment we got the team,” Lerner said.

Thirteen years after Major League Baseball returned to Washington and almost that long since Mark and father Ted Lerner were chosen as owners of their new hometown team, they finally get to throw their party. The fourth All-Star Game in the nation’s capital and first since 1969 is a celebration of a new generation of Washington residents rediscovering the connection to baseball that for so long wasn’t a part of the town’s sporting identity.

“When we first came here, baseball had been gone for so long — basically an entire generation,” longtime Nationals infielder Ryan Zimmerman said. “You almost had to re-learn how to be baseball fans. In the 13 years or so now, it’s been fun for me to be here from the beginning because the organization, the team has kind of grown along with the fan base. I think it’s been fun for both of us kind of starting out. The organization and the team lost a lot. The fans were better than we were as a team at the beginning, but we kind of grew up together.”

When the relocated Montreal Expos moved in 2005, Washington had gone 33 seasons without baseball, save for the Baltimore Orioles 40 miles away. Three incarnations of the Senators — 1891-1899, 1901-1960 before becoming the Minnesota Twins and 1961-71 before becoming the Texas Rangers — came and went, leaving a gap in Washington that almost seems inexplicable in retrospect.

“It’s just the business of baseball,” Nationals All-Star pitcher Max Scherzer said.