SEATTLE -- To open their new ballpark tomorrow, the Seattle Mariners and their supporters followed a now-familiar playbook. The team tantalized fans with a few sneak previews of the predictably dazzling park. Radio stations began broadcasting live and breathlessly from bars across the street, counting down the days. Ticket brokers asked -- and received -- 10 times face value for seats to the long sold-out game.
But also increasingly familiar is the counterpoint that has risen in opposition to this carefully orchestrated buildup -- a rumbling, growing drumbeat of discontent from naysayers who wonder how much is too much for taxpayers to shell out for these lavish new playgrounds.
Safeco Field is the newest and, at $517 million, the costliest of the post-Camden Yards facilities. Several weeks ago, the Mariners outraged many by demanding additional public funds to help cover $100 million in cost overruns in building their new home. Seattle's stadium authority refused, saying team owners had committed to cover all expenses over the $417 million budget, and the dispute now appears headed to court.
"It's corporate welfare," said Chris Van Dyk, a longtime opponent of using public funds to construct the ballpark. "It's a cancer on the city. The body politic will never have control over this entity. The team is going to keep coming back and blackmailing us for more and more money."
Van Dyk, leader of Citizens for More Important Things, represents the extreme end of anti-stadium feelings, but even some longtime loyalists are starting to feel burdened by high costs of modern-day fandom.
"I think the owners have wrung enough money out of citizens," said Charlie Vail, who opposes increasing the public share of building Safeco. "But I know we're going to end up paying for [the cost overruns] one way or another."
Like many fans, though, Vail's disgruntlement stops well short of the ticket booth, where on this recent afternoon he was buying seats for a coming game. It is with a shrug and an air of resignation that he accepts the new economic reality of baseball.
"It's all part of the game now," said Vail, an engineer who lives in suburban Seattle.
All the amenities
The initial demand for more public funds drew instant condemnation among many fans, but the furor began to quell as opening day approached. All but four of the 69 private suites are spoken for, rented on long-term leases for $75,000 to $145,000 a year.
Fans have flocked to several open-house events, and most are seduced by the stunning facility, which has all the bells and whistles of the modern stadium plus the nostalgic grace notes of the classic ones, a combination now expected in these new, old-time parks.
There is the intimate, close-to-the-field feeling from the stands. Sweeping vistas from the upper deck of Puget Sound, the Olympic Mountains and, sometimes, the elusive Mount Rainier. Club-level seats and private suites, a giant, jazzy scoreboard and booming sound system, gourmet food and microbrewed beers. Whimsical touches, the best of which may be the location of the bullpens just on the other side of a fence from a food court and a knothole-dotted wall away from a bar.
But most of all, it is the retractable roof that distinguishes Safeco Field from the stadium it replaces, the gloomy, totally enclosed and artificially turfed Kingdome immediately to the north. Safeco is open-air, with a retractable roof that in 20 minutes can be unfurled to protect players and fans from Seattle's notoriously rainy skies.
"I think it's great. The roof is wonderful. I don't care how much taxpayers have to pay for this, it's worth it," a starry-eyed Lisa Pound said after watching the roof slide away and allow the sun to splash onto the field and stands. Pound, an insurance consultant who lives in nearby Lynnwood, was watching her teen-age son play a game at Safeco one afternoon last week in one of the final tuneups before the official opening. "Of all the things taxpayers have to pay for, I have the least problem with this."
"But a deal's a deal," said her father, Byron Pound, agreeing with the stadium authority's contention that the Mariners had promised to cover construction overruns. "And these owners are billionaires."
The owners, who indeed number among their ranks several billionaires like Nintendo of Japan president Hiroshi Yamauchi, contend that the county and stadium authority had agreed to take on whatever additional debt was needed to complete construction.
Controversial project
The dispute over the cost overrun is just the latest point of contention in what has been a long-running battle over the Mariners' new stadium. In fact, the project has been controversial from the start -- voters by a narrow margin rejected a 1995 referendum to finance a new stadium for the Mariners. Then-Gov. Mike Lowry promptly called a special legislative session and succeeded in getting a revised tax plan enacted to build the park.
For longtime observers of stadium plans, what happened in Seattle is not uncommon: The momentum to build splashy new parks, especially on the promise that they will revitalize downtown, can overwhelm even a vote against such a project. Since the successful 1992 opening of Baltimore's picturesque Camden Yards, cities have clamored to build their own fields of dreams.
"There's an edifice complex at work here," said Robert Baade, a sports economist who teaches at Lake Forest College in Illinois. " 'I want one like this, only bigger.' "
Baade and other economists say that the vaunted economic impact of these new stadiums is overstated.
"The economic benefit is nowhere near what you spend to build these stadiums. The sports paraphernalia shops and the sports bars may do well, but only under certain circumstances," Baade said. "And even sports bars find that their fortunes are closely tied to the team's fortunes. If the team is not doing particularly well, people don't want to stay around after a game and drink."
Even if a new park initially boosts local businesses like parking garages, hotels and restaurants, Baade said, the honeymoon eventually ends.
"There's a novelty effect of new stadiums," he said. "But once that wears off, it's the team's performance that determines how well it will draw. People then vote with their feet. And because of the alienation that fans now feel toward sports -- people are tired of how much professional athletes are paid these days -- they're less likely to support mediocrity the way they might have in the past."
Keeping the team
Though voters don't necessarily want a new stadium and proponents can't prove that the economic benefits are great, parks continue to be built because team owners wield a particularly potent weapon, said Van Dyk, the Safeco opponent. Give us what we want, owners can threaten, or we'll take our ball and go elsewhere. It's a powerful threat in a city like Seattle, which lost an earlier franchise, the Pilots, to Milwaukee, where they became the Brewers.
"They get their hands in the public's pocket because they get to the 9-year-old in all of us that loves to watch someone like Ken Griffey play baseball," Van Dyk said. "The price of wheat has more bearing on what happens in the city of Seattle than anything the Mariners bring to town. But that doesn't matter. There's that qualitative benefit of having the baseball team stay in the city."
As in other cities, the Mariners owners threatened to sell the team if they didn't get the kind of financing plan and stadium lease agreement that they wanted. Although the team has not threatened to leave now if the cost overruns aren't covered by the public, there is still a gnawing fear among some fans that there will be a price to pay if the Mariners don't get more funds: If the team has to shoulder that extra $100 million, maybe there won't be enough money left to re-sign stars like Griffey or Alex Rodriguez, both only signed through next year.
"The Mariners are a small-revenue-market team. These extra tens of millions [to cover the cost overrun] can swing the difference in getting enough money from revenue streams to hold onto Griffey," said Rodney Fort, a sports economist at Washington State University. "It's a big deal to the Mariners. It has almost everything to do with whether they can make it."
The issue of who pays for the cost overrun apparently will be determined in court, and, as usual, the public will have little influence in the matter, Fort said.
"There's open hostility on the streets over this. It's actually kind of funny -- now the people who opposed the stadium and who everyone thought were from the moon, now they're celebrities," Fort said. "But having watched a few of these things, I don't know that it means anything for people to say, 'I'm angry about this '
"What matters is the politicians, and it remains to be seen what happens there. And in this case, it's actually up to a judge. It's clear that even though a majority in the referendum said no, when it comes to new stadiums, it's clear the answer is really yes."