Monday, November 13, 2006

ground breaking

It looks like D.Wright is throwing dirt in Bloomberg’s face.

Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?

==

So I understand that there is all this outrage, and no, I cannot compare the outrage at the naming rights to what happened to almost every music venue in the country. Great Woods became the Tweeter Center, Brendan Byrne became the Continental Airlines Arena, and I don’t even know the corporate name for the Garden State Arts Center - the “opera on the turnpike” referenced by Bruce Springsteen in “Jungleland” - but I know there is one.

It can be a cold sterile lifeless place like the Nokia Theater, or it can be CBGB’s, which has all the heart and soul in the world, but ran itself into the ground because of years of bad business practices. 

I really only care what happens inside the place.

Would everyone be thrilled if the naming rights had not been sold but ticket prices went up $20 per seat?

Would everyone be thrilled if the ballpark stayed Shea Stadium but we couldn’t afford the kick-ass pitcher we need for next year? As TBF astutely pointed out, $20 million pays for Carlos Beltran and pocket change.

This isn’t what happened with Safeco Field, when Seattle was told that the citizenry was supposed to have input into the name, and we woke up one day and the place was named and that was it. They told everyone that they would be selling the naming rights. They didn’t even have to do that.

If you’re going to be upset about the naming rights, then you should be upset about the entire commercialization of baseball, and that train left the station years ago, didn’t it? I’m not trying to be flippant or irreverant, but I’m just not so sure what it matters what it’s called as long as what happens inside the place is what you come there for. Yes, baseball is commercialized. Even I wish I had experiened baseball when every between-inning interval wasn’t jam-packed with commercial sponsorship; that must’ve been awfully nice. I appreciate all of that.

But isn’t what matters what happens on the field, and not what the field is called?