Rich Owners Are Pretty Much The Same Everywhere, Even In Seattle

You gotta despise these guys.

John Ellis and his cronies are putting the Seattle Mariners up for sale. Paul Allen won’t raise a dime or his voice to help renovate the Kingdome, and may not even follow through on his option to purchase the Seahawks if King County presses on without his money.

So that makes the good-guy sports owner in Seattle … Barry Ackerley?

No. Enough.

Can’t live with ‘em.

Can live without ‘em.

And we may have to.

If nothing else, we can finally divest ourselves of the parochially naive prejudice that we’ll be treated any better by wealthy vipers we know than by wealthy vipers from California, or wherever.

Rich guys are rich guys. They want what they want, and they want it now. That’s just as true in Spokane as it is in Seattle, though the poker stakes on the other side are a good deal higher at the moment.

Picture if you will the Washington taxpayer, sitting in his underwear and hoping to draw to an inside straight.

Now, I can’t even make payroll on allowance day at my house, so I can’t expect to comprehend the baroque finances of sculpting stadia. I certainly can’t comprehend the notion of the $2 million set-up reliever, which is mostly why today’s sports franchise needs a palace equipped with luxury suites where the potties are flushed with Dom Perignon.

But this much I know:

Legislators and policymakers have kissed John Ellis’ pompous butt - rapidly, as well as repeatedly - to facilitate a new playpen for the Mariners. And now that the people whose necks are on the line want to ease off the throttle a skosh to make sure the deal is legal and that the state Supreme Court won’t shut down the whole project with the stadium half finished, Ellis and his puppeteers have resorted to the most pernicious kind of power play.

Let’s put it in baseball terms M’s management can understand: King County wants to be sure it isn’t trading for Jeff Manto, OK?

But no. As they have in demanding the costly and unnecessary retractable roof and in bullying site selection along, M’s owners - those neighborly do-gooders who rescued the franchise for us as it was being loaded into freight cars - have stripped away the facade of being at all motivated by doing right by Seattle and the Northwest beyond what might be best for them.

We were kidding ourselves anyway. They’re going to sell it to some outlander eventually. With a new stadium in place, the asking price was just going to be that much higher.

By the way, John. In the event this is all just posturing on your part, all will not be forgiven. You just turned the baseball romance your team struck up with the Northwest into the basest of business relationships.

Which is to say, you suckers had better win.

We are scarcely more enamored of Allen, the computer gotrocks and reluctant groom in this Seahawks engagement - who now wants a $400 million sandbox of his own, as long as it’s not under the Kingdome’s redone roof.

In all fairness, however, he was recruited to this relationship, probably against his better judgment. He also had the most reasonable solution to the cement wart in Pioneer Square: the renovation of Husky Stadium for dual usage by the University of Washington and the Seahawks.

Alas, somehow it has come to pass that a few Montlake homeowners get to decide policy at our state’s biggest institution. Neighborhood concerns are not trivial, but when the stadium has been there longer than the neighbors - and when the stadium is every bit as much ours as theirs - well, there obviously is something to that notion of Husky arrogance.

Now - out of spite, perhaps - Allen will not sign off on any Kingdome renovation, and on Friday a task force accessorized with the appropriate nose ring went along with him. It recommended the joint be razed and a $400 million replacement built.

So, for those of you scoring at home, that’s about $800 million worth of stadia - for two teams that may or may not be sticking around. And that’s not even figuring in the $130 million of Kingdome debt still outstanding.

Yes! Paul Allen wants us to tear down a building we haven’t paid for yet, to build another bullring that will be used 10 times a year.

Twenty, if Major League Soccer comes to the party.

Please, Lord, if it does, make sure local ownership isn’t involved.

We have deluded ourselves into believing that local ownership is the ticket. Paul Allen is the savior. John Ellis and his merry men are selfless philanthropists willing to lose many millions to keep baseball in the Northwest, though something tells me John isn’t feeding his family on Spam-by-the-case from Warehouse Foods.

Local ownership will compromise and see the big picture. Local ownership cares more about the local than the ownership.

But all these civic saviors have done is force King County into making stadium decisions - which deserve careful study and debate - in a crisis atmosphere, the same thing little Jeffy Smulyan and reptilian Ken Behring tried to do. The same thing Art Modell did in Cleveland and Jerry Reinsdorf did in Chicago.

They are rich guys, and they understand a gun to the head will get you money quicker than if you swaddle yourself in Armani and try to look needy.

It was easier to live with the Mariners’ manufactured urgency the first time around, if only because management had finally hinted at its willingness to build a winner - and because the players conspired to make it happen. They also happened to be first in line when the bank opened.

The Seahawks can only win when it doesn’t matter, however. People still look at the logo and see Behring’s leer. They understand that Seattle proved itself as a football town long before the Seahawks proved themselves as a football team.

And they know that as saviors go, Allen can’t keep his ankles dry. Every time Microsoft stock goes up a point, he has enough spare change to build his own stadium - where he wants and how he wants it.

Of course, rich guys don’t get richer that way.

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