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With a new roster comes a new stadium partnership, and a new color scheme to boot. Safeco Field is well and truly dead. Welcome to T-Mobile Park.
The scouting report is in—we’re proud to announce that for the next 25 years, every @Mariners home opener will be played at T-Mobile Park! ⚾ pic.twitter.com/ePdJTNH3Jq
— T-Mobile (@TMobile) December 19, 2018
That there is sure a baseball field. While they’re not fully embracing Matthew Roberson’s call to paint the seats pink, there is a pink aura that I actually find relatively pleasant, if incongruous. The new partnership will also apparently offer perks, unsurprisingly, to T-Mobile users.
Highlights include:
— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) December 19, 2018
• Early access via the T-Mobile 'Pen with giveaways and live DJ on select days along with great food & drinks
• T-Mobile Tuesdays feat. seat upgrades & giveaways
• Fast-track entry, discounted tickets & exclusive merchandise offers for T-Mobile customers pic.twitter.com/nLlcNi3Kk3
It will also apparently offer live DJs in the Pen on occasion, which feels like a threat as much as anything. My major gripe is the name itself. Mariners fandom has been privy to a luxury in its entirety to this point. “I’m headed to the Kingdome”, or “they’re at Safeco” have been simple shorthands for decades. Even the Pilots likely had the simplicity of “See you at Sicks’!” And thanks to Seattle’s penchant for promoting internal greenery, proclaiming “let’s go to the Park” is liable to create more confusion than clarity.
Thanks to online gaming and common sense, I am wary of a quarter-century of “heading to T-Mo/Teemo”, but am not sure what uniform shorthand will crop up otherwise to evade the laborious effort of saying T-Mobile Park. This are the tribulations we are tasked with, however, and we must make do. So welcome our magenta overlords. May they inspire playoff fortune and financially flexible ownership.