What's in a name?

Just ask John Lilyestrom, a lawyer from the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., who is potentially sitting on a five-figure check, thanks to a fortunate confluence of events that began five years ago when he was trolling the Internet.

A lifelong baseball fan, Lilyestrom decided to snatch up the Internet domain names, Washingtonnationals.com and Washingtonnationals.net.

"If I recall correctly, I think one of the groups that was trying to get a team back 10-15 years ago actually said that was going to be the name of the team if they got one," said Lilyestrom, 42. "I think it was the group going after the Pirates or the Astros or one of those. I thought, 'Hey that would be the good name.'"

A good name, indeed. When Major League Baseball decided to move the Montreal Expos and rename them the Nationals, Lilyestrom's Web sites became prime pieces of Internet real estate.

New Web site domain names can be secured for as little as $20. But the secondary market for existing domain names can be quite lucrative. For example, Major League Baseball recently purchased the Web site, Nationals.com, for $20,000.

"As any good business will do in expectation of anything like this, we go after domain names, which are very inexpensive to register," said Jim Gallagher, Sr. Vice President, Corporate Communications for Major League Baseball Advanced Media. "Nationals.com was in fact owned by an individual and we bought it from him. We're extremely pleased that we were able to purchase the optimal domain name, which is the single name of the team. But we are always interested in expanding and protecting baseball's marks and trademarks. We are certainly looking into washingtonnationals.com, as well."

Lilyestrom hadn't done much with his sites, other than post a message urging local fans not to trek up to Baltimore and support the Orioles. The sites had received barely 2,000 visitors during the past four years.

"For a long time the argument being used to block baseball here in D.C. was that it would hurt the Orioles attendance," Lilyestrom said. "I hadn't updated it in years until the whole Washington baseball business started getting revved up again in the last few months."

When the news of the Expos' move broke, baseball fans flooded his site, causing it to crash. After receiving up to 150 e-mails a day -- many from angry Orioles fans -- Lilyestrom has since recast the site from an anti-Orioles bent to a pro-Nationals tilt. That reduced the number of e-mails, but he is still being contacted by fans searching for Nationals information.

"I get e-mails from people looking for jobs, looking for tickets, looking for hats," he said. "I sort of created a macro that responds by e-mail and points them to the right Web site, and tells them that I'm not affiliated with the team."

Lilyestrom said he hasn't heard from anyone associated with Major League Baseball.

"I'm not sure that I would expect them to, given that they've got they're own domain registered and set up. Third parties have contacted me about buying it. I hadn't intended to sell it. I didn't do this in order to try to hold onto the name and then make some money off of it."

Whatever happens to his Web sites, Lilyestrom is already looking forward to attending games next year.