It Makes A Lotto Sense To Give M’S A New Ballpark

H&R Block, I’m not. But as near as I can figure, my family’s mandated contribution to building a new home for the Seattle Mariners would be satisfied by the purchase of one lottery scratch ticket per year for the next two decades.

This is what all the knee-jerk outrage is about?

Tell you what. I’ve never indulged in Lotto in my life, but just to get things jump-started I’ll buy the first round of tickets for every household on my block.

Of course, it’s not that simple.

But it wasn’t blackmail, either, or another conspiracy of greedy millionaires to warm their hands in your pockets. Thankfully, the legislators who worked a $320 million funding plan through special session recognized that.

They did it without raising your taxes, by voting in a tax credit equal to what the state would lose should the Mariners be sold and moved and by adding a few new sports lottery games. King County still must assume the greatest expense and the Mariners will kick in a little, too - $45 million.

Or about $45 million more than any other major league team has contributed toward new stadium construction in the last 35 years.

Now the pols are taking flak for it, neither unexpected nor undeserved.

That our fiscal bulldogs took a bite out of essential services their last time at bat, but then found the leeway to fund a new baseball stadium, is pretty damned hard to defend. Like anyone else, I can think a few dozen things that deserve our assistance more than the neighborhood subsidiary of Selig and Fehr, Very Ltd.

But then, I’m often honked at how my tax dollars work. I don’t like seeing public schools under-resourced and over-administrated, and some of the fluff curriculum and assorted boondoggles in post-secondary education are appalling.

As for the public financing of private enterprise, well, our agricultural system has long been knee-deep in subsidies and price supports. Wealthy businesses and rich men wallow in tax breaks which make them wealthier and richer. Can an airplane be built for our Air Force without the government being gouged $600 for a seat belt?

Whether it’s state money or federal, let’s just say there’s a precedent, OK?

No one liked the scenario of being backed into a corner on this, but the fact is the owners of the Mariners haven’t threatened to move if they don’t get a new stadium.

They’ve said they’ll put the team up for sale, because the prospect of losing $30 million every year - and the books are open - is not worth even the thrill of a pennant race. Now, if you and a few buddies can come up with the millions to buy the club and think you can make it turn a profit in the Kingdome, have at it.

Maybe it can. Winning will fill the seats - it did this past month - and if previous owners had acknowledged that truth we wouldn’t have had to endure 18 years of Mario Mendoza and Jim Maler. Hiroshi Yamauchi help us if the M’s playoff run hadn’t rousted the politicians to action.

But there are bills to pay between pennants, and there won’t be an October for the M’s every year. An open-air stadium is a sunny-day draw in July when the team is 10 games out and when the corporate boxes and club seats keep a team afloat - though just barely, as the Cleveland Cinderellas have come to realize.

Baseball’s economics are despicable, but would you rather be within driving distance of a game while the sport tries to heal itself or wake up one morning and find the owners and players have figured it all out but you have to fly to San Francisco to catch nine innings?

I guess it would be blackmail if having a baseball franchise was our God-given right. It isn’t.

Sadly, even if we’d said no to the stadium, it would hardly be a lesson to the millionaires. Big Unit can make big bucks anywhere, and Yamauchi can always sell you another Game Boy.

Now, it would be nice to get it in writing that the club will stay for 30 or 40 years once ground is broken, and it wouldn’t hurt if with each new player contract negotiated, the M’s insisted on a minimum level of community service - statewide. It wouldn’t kill Junior to spend a few hours at the West Central Community Center.

But in the meantime, stop making people feel guilty about feeling good.

The angry mob opposed to state involvement in a stadium clings to the hope that the King County Council will decide it can’t live with the math, that it puts the suicide squeeze on the county’s bond rating, that the whole thing will come tumbling down like so many Kingdome ceiling tiles.

Let this, they implore, be our stand against the arrogance of baseball.

OK. Just understand it will be the last stand.

Hey, Mariners baseball is exactly what critics contend. Compared to schools, social services and serious industry, the game is trivial, a frill, a bonafide excess. For 18 summers, it was a joke in search of a laugh track, for the last two months our own, private opiate.

But I’ve lived in Washington for 15 years and in the Northwest all my life, and the only other thing I can remember which brought people of this region together like the Mariners’ playoff run - which forged a commonality this intense - was the eruption and ash of Mount St. Helens, your basic act of God.

If winning was truly what prodded legislators into rescuing the stadium issue, so be it. It’s fallout we can live with, and love.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review