“Ma Bell Park, anyone?” From the Chron:
The name of the [San Francisco] Giants’ ballpark, which gets changed almost as often as the Giants change pitchers, is about to change again.
It’s not going to be SBC Park anymore. It’s going to be something else.
That’s because SBC Communications Inc. said Thursday that it will adopt the name AT&T Inc. after it finishes acquiring that company, a $16 billion deal expected to be official by the end of the year. The name will spread to all of SBC’s properties.
Good lord. Whatever happened to naming venues for important people or places? So long, Pac Bell, er, SBC. Couldn’t they instead name it to honor some baseball hero or evoke the area it serves? And make the company name secondary, like how the Rose Bowl, unlike the other now silly sounding bowl games, relegated its corporate sponsor to a “presented by” byline?
The city has no legal sway in naming the ballpark, which was privately financed by the Giants after San Francisco voters shot down two ballot measures to pay for the park with public money.
But that hasn’t stopped city supervisors from trying to strong-arm the Giants into incorporating local references into the commercial name.
Early last year, Supervisor Chris Daly and Matt Gonzalez, then president of the Board of Supervisors, tried to qualify a resolution for the ballot to rename the ballpark “[Willie] Mays Field at SBC Park.”
They failed.
Yeah, I know, civic pride notwithstanding, big sports is big business. Still, Candlestick will always be Candlestick to me. Sorry, 3Com. Er, Monster.
[Addendum (Oct. 31): Just to link this to the field of graphic design: Though SBC will adopt the name AT&T, the classic globe logo (or more humorously, “Death Star”) designed by Saul Bass will be replaced by a new logo, yet to be unveiled. See Design Observer (via kottke.org).]
2 replies on “Naming rights”
Oy.
You know, it’s interesting that the name AT&T is worth far more than the company that originally had that name. Who would have thought back in the 50s that AT&T would one day be not a company, but a brand name that would be applied to several different companies… and a ballpark?
Every time I hear AT&T I think about the movie 2001 where Dr. Floyd used a picturephone with a big Bell Telephone logo, and the orbital Shuttle was Pan Am. Oops. At least Hilton is still around, though we certainly don’t have a space station like that or regular flights to a big cool Clavius moonbase.
re fields, I was annoyed the other morning by the way they kept saying the name of the field on NPR when talking about the World Series. It was almost as if they were getting paid to say it over and over: “U.S. Cellular Field.”