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money. Smulyan’s entrepreneurial moxie had allowed him to assemble a
string of radio stations and buy one of the world’s most expensive toys—a
baseball team. Unfortunately, a winning season hadn’t translated to suc-
cess at the turnstiles. His creditors were tightening the screws. When The
Seattle Times reported that a document at Smulyan’s local bank indicated
he intended to move the M’s after the 1992 season, his denial was em-
phatic: “I will dispute to the death that that is our strategy. (But) I’ll tell
you this: There are people in that bank who say baseball doesn’t work in
Seattle. They have concluded this isn’t a viable business.”...^2
First the Pilots, now the M’s. Two strikes probably would be out for
Seattle as a baseball town. Gorton introduced legislation that would have
required major league teams to share about half their revenues from local
broadcasting contracts. National TV revenues were already being pooled.
The plan was designed to boost the overall health of Major League Base-
ball by helping small-market clubs like the Mariners, who expected to
end 1991 $10 million in the hole. With radio and TV contracts estimated
at $3.5 million that year, the M’s take from TV was the lowest in the big
leagues while the Yankees were receiving $50 million from the local air-
waves alone. Gorton emphasized that his plan was not “a completely even
playing field.” Clubs in the big media markets would still have far greater
resources. He acknowledged, however, that the chances of his bill passing
Congress in the near future were “somewhere between slim and none.”
He was right.^3
“George Argyros, who sold the Mariners to Smulyan, was always bitch-
ing about the Kingdome—rightly,” Gorton observes. The concrete coli-
seum was funded by the taxpayers as one of the Forward Thrust mea-
sures Gorton championed as a legislator. It opened in 1976 to mixed
reviews. Playing baseball on fake grass under a concrete sky was not a
field of dreams. Angled onto what was basically a football venue, the
Kingdome’s compact ball park was a hitter’s delight, a pitcher’s night-
mare and a fan’s frustration. It had lousy sightlines and the ambiance of
a mausoleum, especially on days when sunshine was glistening off Puget
Sound and the mountains were out.
“Smulyan got a sweetheart deal on his lease, including an escape
clause,” Gorton says. “In exchange, he had to agree that before he tried to
move the team or sell it he would offer it to someone who would keep it
here at a price to be set by an appraiser. Smulyan thought that was a good
deal because there’d never been anyone here who could make it work. It
was obvious that he wanted to move the team to Tampa, one way or an-
other—either by selling it or staying on as owner. We had 120 days to