That’s the question now before the overlords of the game-the club owners and their chief executive, Commissioner Fay Vincent. Ever since Nintendo officials last month offered to buy a majority interest in the Seattle Mariners, baseball’s bosses have balked. It’s not hard to see why. Baseball has historically been a racially insensitive, snobby, status quo institution. It still is, the efforts of good men like Vincent notwithstanding. So hostility to the Japanese would be just more of the same.
Of course, there’s more to the argument against nonNorth American ownership than xenophobia. You don’t have to be Pat Buchanan to appreciate that some cultural icons, simply as a matter of pride, are best kept close to home. And you don’t have to be George F. Will to know that baseball occupies a special place in the national soul. (The Japanese understand it: their baseball rules prohibit foreign ownership.) The argument is based on emotion, not rationality, economic or otherwise, It has great visceral appeal, “Baseball is a national trust,” Vincent told NEWSWEEK. “We don’t run the game solely as a business.”
In this case, though, the benefits may outweigh the risks. For better and for worse, baseball has become so expensive that family-owned teams like the Dodgers are now the exception. Signing free agents and even mediocre players takes tens of millions of green. Smaller markets find it hard to compete and, when the time comes to sell a franchise, few if any local buyers step up to the fiscal plate. Such is the bind that faced the Seattle Mariners. Nobody came forward to meet the $100 million price set by owner Jeff Smulyan, who wants to move the team to Florida. That’s when a U.S. senator and other officials approached Nintendo, which has a major corporate presence in Washington state.
As the deal has been proposed, Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, would buy 60 percent of the Mariners. But his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, who runs Nintendo of America and has lived in Seattle for 15 years, would get effective control of the club. That’s more local involvement than Smulyan - who lives in Indianapolis - ever provided. Moreover, approving the transaction would prevent Smulyan from moving the team to Tampa/St. Petersburg. Which is the worse of two evils that baseball abhors-foreign ownership or franchise relocation? Just ask the fans of Flatbush.
The Japanese might even have something to contribute to American baseball. Maybe Japanese management would foster a civil relationship with the players union. Or learn to bid more sanely on .500 pitchers with sore arms and sore egos. Or, Lord forbid, help teach that winning isn’t the only virtue to be applauded on the diamond. Or maybe the most to hope for is a change in cuisine. “Kingdome vendors will have to start offering heart-healthy Japanese food to us baseball fans,” William Sullivan wrote last week in a Seattle newspaper, “instead of the normal menu of sodium-drenched, artery-clogging grease.” For any of that to happen, though, Fay Vincent and his charges, when they meet next month, will have to take it on faith that their sport can withstand another innovation.
