Money Grabbers

The tickets are bought, the hotel room has been guaranteed. You’ve already blocked out that week for vacation and it’s too late to change it.

Your kids are giddy with anticipation. Your 12-year-old son has toned down the attitude. Your 8-year-old daughter hasn’t taken off her Alex Rodriguez jersey since you told her. Your wife, who would jettison you in a heartbeat if Edgar Martinez asked her to be in a hardware commercial with him, has even eased up on the honey-dos.

So you’re going to think I’m crazy when I ask you for this favor.

Don’t go.

The Seattle Mariners cut the ribbon at Safeco Field on July 15 and you have four tickets that will make you a witness to history, but I’m suggesting you go camping instead.

I’m asking you to address a nice note to John Ellis and Howard Lincoln, the two shameless front men for the despicable frauds who own the Mariners. Something along the lines of “Safeco this, pal,” would be appropriate. Fold it, tuck your Opening Night tickets inside it, stuff it all in an envelope and mail it back to the ballclub.

Making certain, of course, that it doesn’t arrive until after Opening Night, so as to prevent ownership from reselling the damn things.

You don’t have to drive over and make a picket sign and hang Howard in effigy, or make your son give up Nintendo64 - yeah, right - or refuse to lose yourself in the game on the tube. Just the monetary and emotional sacrifice would be above and beyond the call, though if you do want to indulge in a little on-site activism - a jacket burning or something - I’d be happy to at least get your name in the paper.

You deserve it at least as much as Ken Griffey Jr.

You have endured a generation of mediocre baseball, only briefly interrupted. You have smoldered through misguided management and greedheaded ownership since the last Seattle baseball palace opened.

And now the dirty rotten scoundrels want you to moonwalk their way so they can pick your pocket again.

By now, you have had time to digest the brazen money grab M’s ownership made last week, formally seeking another $60 million of public funds to pay for cost overruns at Safeco Field that the Mariners themselves had pledged to pay.

Disgust would be the obvious reaction, though possibly the businessman and bandit deep inside you secretly admires the bald-faced larceny of it all - how Ellis and Lincoln puffed up their chests and played themselves off as victims. Ellis, the chief executive offal czar, is particularly good at this, blubbering tearfully the last time he sensed he and his fellow got-rocks were actually going to have to shoulder a reasonable burden of ownership.

Surely you know that the whole matter is bound for endless litigation, with the M’s battalion of ambulance chasers siphoning off money that could be used to acquire another starting pitcher.

It couldn’t be used to re-sign Rodriguez or Junior. You can consider them gone as of now. So outrageous is this latest ownership boondoggle that neither player will hesitate in swinging for the salary fences when negotiations begin in earnest.

And Mariners owners have no intention to emerge from this boardroom farce anything but richer.

They will either get the $60 million or some other figure, or they will scale the payroll back to Twinsian thriftiness, or they will simply sell the club and bank the considerable profit.

There is, really, nothing we can do about it - except not be a willing participant in it.

Of course, the most futile thing in the world is to suggest to a sports fan that he moderate his fanaticism, and perhaps the most foolhardy thing is for a sportswriter to make the suggestion.

Especially this sportswriter, who was persuaded the deal hammered out by the legislature four years ago was not such a bad thing - naively developing amnesia about the robber baron factor.

In fact, it still isn’t such a bad deal. Unless you buy a scratch ticket, or rent a car or eat a meal in Seattle, you don’t contribute a dollar to the building of Safeco Field. It is because the restaurant tax, in particular, in King County has done so spectacularly that M’s have seen fit to demand payback from the civic kitty.

“This is not a popular thing to do,” said Lincoln, the chairman of Nintendo of America, in announcing this fiscal incursion, “but it is the right thing to do.”

And he was serious.

Well, leaving about 25,000 seats empty on Opening Night wouldn’t be the popular thing, either, but it would be the right thing. It would be even more right if that indifference carried on all season.

Would it nudge the owners from their chosen course? Probably not. That they have poisoned whatever public goodwill they still enjoyed does not bother them a whit. If their toxic PR does begin to show up in the receipts, well, it might hasten their timetable for selling the team, but I’m assuming the language of the 20-year lease is more ironclad than the language of funding and that whoever winds up owning the club will at least own it in Seattle.

Naturally, management would dust off the old lecture that lack of support at the gate only mitigates against the club remaining competitive on the field.

To which you might answer, competitive? Melvin Bunch? Ken Cloude? Russ Davis? Jose Mesa? A second-place team, five games out in a second-rate division?

Sheesh. You have to be talked out of going?