-- April 11, 2006 --

Tradition For Sale

Baseball is a business.

 That pronouncement surely comes as no surprise to anyone. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee famously sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees to finance a theatrical production. Franchises lacking in paid attendance have moved to new cities hoping for a boost. Labor disputes have stopped the game in its tracks numerous times in its history. Professional Baseball, despite its many purer and more poetic attributes, is first and foremost about the pursuit of the almighty dollar.  

 So I suppose I shouldn’t find the proliferation of corporate-named stadiums so distasteful – but I do.

 At the risk of sounding like a cranky old coot, it wasn’t so long ago that I used to go to White Sox games at Comiskey Park, or drive up to Milwaukee to catch the Brewers at County Stadium. Now, of course, you have to visit U.S. Cellular Field or Miller Park to watch those teams.

 When the White Sox’s new stadium was christened in 1990, I was actually against the name "Comiskey Park." This, after all, had been the name of the place across the street for 90 years, and I argued that the name and all the memories associated with it should remain with the demolished old park. "Veeck Park," for instance, in honor of the colorful and legendary Sox owner Bill Veeck, would have been a better choice. But the Sox organization stuck with the Comiskey name, citing tradition. 12 years later, tradition lost out to hard cash. Comiskey was no more, and U.S. Cellular Field was born. "U.S. Cellular Field." Say that out loud a few times. It rolls off the tongue with all the eloquence of a mouth full of peanut butter. 

 One might be tempted to go a bit easier on Miller Park. The team is called the "Brewers" anyway, and what’s more synonymous with Milwaukee than Miller Beer? And they weren’t going to rename an existing park; this was a brand new, state-of-the-art facility which wasn’t going to build itself. Surely we can put up with a corporate name if it means a beautiful new stadium for the team, right? Well… no. Of the nearly $400 million it took to build Miller Park, $310 million came from public tax money. The other $90 million was financed privately by the Brewers’ owners. So where does the Miller Brewing Company figure into this? Simple -- they pay the team $2.1 million a year for their name on the sign. You can barely get a third-string utility infielder to warm the bench for that.

 In the case of the White Sox, $3.4 million per year is the price for abandoning history. In San Diego, Petco pays $2.7 million. Comerica shells out $2.2 million in Detroit, $2 million for PNC in Pittsburgh. The list goes on, and the figures are similar. In an era when the average team’s player payroll is around $70 million annually, does that extra 2 or 3 million really make that much difference? Is it worth the loss of both tradition and fans’ limited good will? Of course, the owners would say yes, that their profit margins have been squeezed so tightly that every source of revenue needs to be exploited -- er, explored.

 But pick the wrong sponsor and the potential for embarrassment is great. The most glaring example of this happened in Houston, where the Astros elected to name their new ballpark "Enron Field" after a company which would soon come to embody all the greed and moral deficiency of evil corporate America. Oops. After a brief legal fight, the team bought back the rights from Enron for a reported $2.1 million, and renamed the facility "Astros Field." The purists among us hoped that this fiasco might signal the beginning of the end for the naming-rights trend. But alas, it was not to be. Less than a year later the Astros struck another deal, and Enron/Astros Field became "Minute Maid Park." Sigh.

 This season, the San Francisco Giants began the seventh year in their current stadium… with its third name. Pacific Bell, the original sponsor, was bought out by SBC, which later merged with AT&T. The park’s name has changed right along with the company’s. If the Giants organization isn’t embarrassed by this, it should be.

 It's worth pointing out that we do still have Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and Wrigley Field (named for owner Phil Wrigley, not his gum company), along with a few other traditional holdouts. But it seems to be a losing battle – 18 of MLB’s 30 teams have sold naming rights so far. And it’s a safe bet that the new parks on tap for the Twins, Mets, and Nationals will go that route as well.

 What’s worse is that this naming-rights hysteria has oozed its way from the Major Leagues down to the once uncontaminated realm of the Minors. In recent years, the good old Joe W. Davis Stadiums and Luther Williams Fields have been giving way to the Applebee’s Parks, Champion Window Stadiums, and Fifth Third Fields.

 Where will it all end? I don’t know. But I do know that whenever I talk about going to a White Sox game, I’ll still always say, "I’m going down to Comiskey."