Seattle Has No Good Reason To Vote No

The Mariners may be closing in on an extended life as a playoff team, but when you go to the Kingdome these days, it feels like the approaching death of baseball.

Breathlessly excited playoff fans have been displaced by empty seats, a phenomenon that may actually have a plausible, though non-traditional explanation.

They used to say Seattle was a football town until the Seahawks went bad. Over the last three years, you haven’t heard much about the old football town.

Seattle is a front-runners town, a bandwagon town and a big-event town. Sports fans around here like winners, whether it’s in the form of the Final Four, the Goodwill Games or the Huskies, when they’re highly ranked and playing other big-time college powerhouses.

My guess is if the Mariners get into the playoffs, the place will be full of fans making jet airplane-level noise.

I keep waiting for someone involved with the anti-stadium collective to stand up and make a viable point for voting against the stadium issue.

Tell me you loathe professional baseball and football and want to eliminate the option of ever again attending a Mariners or Seahawks game.

Go for it. I could at least respect the honesty of the opinion.

Instead, I’ve heard only two complaints from the anti-stadium crowd, both of which are mindless, indefensible positions of cultural absurdity.

The first is that to vote for the stadium issue is to subsidize millionaire players and greedy owners.

I doubt that professional baseball players around the country are laying awake at night fearing for their future on the outcome of King County’s stadium vote.

The players suiting up in a Mariners uniform this season will still be playing two years from now after the team heads to Vancouver, or Orlando or wherever it goes when it leaves. They will still be making big bucks, they will still be playing baseball, they just won’t be doing it in a place where Northwest baseball fans can watch them in person.

No franchise has ever sold for less than it was originally purchased for, so there’s a fairly good chance the owners will make a profit on the deal, too. The losers will be anyone who may want to exercise the option of attending a major league baseball game.

The only other anti-pro sports theory I’m aware of is one that suggests you couldn’t get a loan to buy a home from a bank if you didn’t know the exact price, location and other particulars of the house, so why should you vote for the stadium, which has similar unanswered questions.

This is a point of view directly relevant to all of us home owners who entertain two million or more friends and family each year and employ workers in our home on an annual payroll of $30 million or more.

The future of professional sports in Seattle, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with applying for a private home loan and it has nothing to do with sending a message to players and owners.

It has to do with whether, as a community, those of us in King County are willing to raise sales taxes approximately one cent on each $10 spent for the option of being able to watch professional baseball and football. If the Mariners get to the playoffs, even the antistadium crowd might enjoy baseball.

By then though, it might be too late.