The Outsider Positions to Get Back In

'He's a Genius Marketer'

Smulyan had a vision for baseball when he purchased the Mariners in 1989: He was going to change the way it sold itself. He wouldn't simply sell $5 box seats and stock the concession stands with extra Cracker Jack. He wanted entertainment -- flashy scoreboards, booming music and team mascots that would be available for birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and school picnics.

In other words, Jeff Smulyan's baseball world in 1989 looked a lot like everyone else's in 2005.

"Baseball has a lot of different audiences and you have to put something together that makes each audience feel good and that overall the product on the field has to be great," he said. "But what you learn is that a baseball game is three hours long. It's got to be an entertaining experience."

In Seattle, he created a kids' section, played songs for each player as he came to the plate and claims his staff invented the concept of running movie snippets on the video board -- all now standard features in ballparks.

"He's a genius marketer," said Bob Watt, who as deputy mayor of Seattle in those days worked regularly with Smulyan on a number of issues including getting a new stadium, finding more investors -- and possibly moving the team out of town.

It is the last part that troubles many in Washington. While Smulyan might have made the Mariners a marketing success, he also dumped the franchise and left town three years after he bought it, hounded by banks, frustrated by his own lack of financial capital and Seattle's unwillingness to build him a stadium.

Looking back it is clear Smulyan did not know what he was walking into when he bought the Mariners for $76 million in August 1989. He bought a team without much of a fan base in a city where football was the sport of choice. And it was a community that had little municipal support for professional sports. Seattle had been burned by baseball before when the expansion Pilots went bankrupt after one year and were snatched away by Selig, then a used car dealer who moved the franchise to his home town of Milwaukee.

The only reason Seattle got another shot at baseball was because the city sued the American League in the early 1970s and was promised an expansion franchise in exchange for dropping the suit. The resulting team, the Mariners, had gone through two owners -- a group headed by the actor Danny Kaye followed by California businessman George Argyros -- before Smulyan bought them.

Smulyan, coming from Indianapolis, said he understood little of this history until after he bought the team. All he knew was he had purchased a club that never had a winning season and was playing in the Kingdome, perhaps the dreariest stadium in the major leagues.

'He Outsmarted Himself'

Right from the start there were problems. The Mariners had one of the lowest payrolls in the American League, at about $10 million. Smulyan tried to increase it to $22 million by 1992, yet even then it wound up being at the bottom. Smulyan was also taking a hit in his own business, as the radio industry went through a crushing downturn.

He began to push for the things he needed to make the team profitable -- a new ballpark and a big television deal. And here is where Seattle opinion splits on Smulyan. Some say he was a man desperate to make baseball happen in the Northwest. Others think he used his financial problems as a ploy to run to a new domed stadium in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"I think he was struggling to get an outcome that I think he wanted, which was to keep the team in Seattle," Watt said. "His financial circumstances at the time kept him from doing this."