On What’s Wrong with Naming Rights

Warning: Contains political content. Those of you who don’t want to read anything political at MLBlogs need to skip this article.

I saw the San Francisco Giants play at Candlestick Park twice. Now it’s just the 49′ers playing football there, sort of. And, for now, the stadium’s called Monster Park. (The winds are certainly monstrous).

Perhaps you have read other entries I have made on this blog about seeing the Oakland A’s at the Coliseum. It’s full official title used to be the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum or something like that, which might have even been longer than I can remember. The fans, the announcers and the nearby train station referred to it as the Oakland Coliseum, which was good because that let you know where it was in a manner that was easier to say than the whole kit-n-kaboodle designation of city and county. But in recent years they started calling it Network Associates Coliseum and, most recently, McAfee Coliseum.

After many years of political wrangling, the San Francisco Giants finally got to build their downtown stadium. It opened in 2000 as Pac Bell Park. But I live across the Bay in Oakland, and grew up a Mets fan, so I just never got around to seeing the Giants at Pac Bell Park. The corporation Pac Bell was swallowed up by SBC; the Pac Bell name disappeared from the new merged corporation’s properties. So the park was renamed SBC Park.

When Eric Byrnes got exiled by Oakland to Colorado after the 2005 All-Star Game, I planned to go to SBC Park to catch the Giants-Rockies series at the beginning of August. But Byrnesie was traded to Baltimore before the Rockies got to San Francisco. So that series became much ado about nothing to me and I waited until the middle of August to see the Orioles and the A’s at the Oakland, uh, excuse me, McAfee Coliseum.

So I missed SBC Park, too. AT&T and SBC have merged. (So much for breaking up Ma Bell, eh?) The SBC name is disappearing from the new corporation’s properties. I attended AT&T Park when Byrnesie came to "The City" as an Arizona Diamondback at the end of April.

It’s the same ballpark as the one that opened in 2000. So I haven’t really missed anything through all these name changes…or have I?

Despite some changes in and around the game in my lifetime, including: permanent domes, artificial grass, retractable domes, MLB teams in Canada, divisions, playoffs, limits to the number of times the manager can go to the mound without a making a pitching change, free agency, arbitration, "The Closer", mascots at the stadium, the DH in one league, wild cards, alternate uniforms, regular season MLB in Arizona and Florida, seasons opening in Japan, the All-Star Game deciding home field advantage in the World Series, colorful, hockey goalie-style catcher’s masks, a woman PA announcer (in the many-named San Francisco venue), a woman color announcer (in the mono-named New York American League venue), ball girls, ball dudes (really old guys) and sabermetrics, we like to think of baseball as a tradition-bound game.

And stadium names are part of the tradition. They have put seats atop the Great Green Monster, but it’s still Fenway Park. The Cubs now play at night, but it’s still Wrigley Field. Can you imagine Yankee Stadium being called anything other than Yankee Stadium? "My Friend, the Yankees Fan" says a name change is coming. But the new name will arrive with the new edifice in Manhattan. Not even King George Steinbrenner will mess with the name of "The House that Ruth Built." The St. Louis Cardinals are maintaining tradition, and with a corporate name at that, by calling their new home New Busch Stadium. (Or, as some fans call it, "Busch III").

The situation in San Francisco and Oakland shows just what is wrong with "naming rights." They turn the stadiums from the home field of one or more sports teams, and a landmark of the city, into giant advertising billboards that change as their renters change. The frequent mergers we see in the telecommunications industry and in the computer industry of nearby Silicon Valley create frequent changes in corporate names, which lead to changes in stadium names. And that just seems to be a reminder of how baseball has dropped in priority at the ball parks. What matters most now are things like how many luxury boxes the place has, what else you can do at the park, e.g. swimming, barbequing, doing a walking course, or accessing your email via WiFi, and which corporation has paid big bucks to have broadcasters trip over the new stadium name several times a night this year.

What makes it worse when you have the stadium named after a non-baseball corporation is that your stadium and your team become linked with the doings of that corporation. Do you really want that? AT &T was recently named as one of the telecommunications corporations cooperating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in turning over phone records of tens of millions of Americans for what USA Today calls "a massive government database." You know tens of millions of Americans are not terrorists or people who know terrorists, so what’s this about other than the building of a surveillance state in "the land of the free"? I’m waiting for metal detectors to appear at ballparks as part of the power elite’s (Republicans AND Democrats) ongoing campaign of fear.

That just about everything today, even DNA and pollution, can be commodified and sold for profit doesn’t mean that just about everything should be. Stadium names are one of those things, like DNA and pollution, that shouldn’t be sold to the highest bidder. (If you don’t understand what I mean about selling pollution, look into the issue of pollution credits).

Ballparks should be named for the team that plays there (Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium), the neighborhood (Candlestick Park, Fenway Park), or other geographical area in which the stadium is located (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum), or both (Oriole Park at Camden Yards), or an individual (Shea Stadium, Wrigley Field) or corporation (Coors Field, Busch Stadium) most essential to getting the stadium constructed. However, with the last there should also be the proviso that the stadium name will be changed to a team and/or geographical designation if the corporate name ceases to exist. None of this changing names every few years when there’s a corporate merger. No turning the ballpark into a product placement ad sold to the highest bidder.

K.R.