Back to the Seattle Mariners Newsfeed

Whose stadium is it? They tell us it’s ours, only not when it comes to selling the big money name

The public is getting fleeced on the naming rights for our baseball stadium — to the estimated tune of $50 to $100 million. So we should resist the corporate choice for what to call it.

The Mariners finally got that sweet lease deal signed by the government this week — the one in which taxpayers were corralled into putting another $135 million into upkeep at the stadium.

But the deal is about to get sweeter. The argument that won the day for the privately-owned Mariners is that the public owns the stadium — because we built it for them — so we ought to be willing to fork over to maintain it.