I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to like Phoenix Jones. I was excited to attend Sasha Pasulka’s Tech Show on Feb 20, but Jones was not the person I came to see.  I figured at best he’d be kind of uninteresting.  At worst, a complete joker. I was pleasantly surprised.

For example, I did not know that Jones actually wore the same body armor that our troops wear – and that he has been shot twice in that armor.  I also did not know that he works closely with Police, making sure he gathers evidence properly when he is at a crime scene.  Also, whenever a police officer orders him to stand down, he does exactly that.

Jones has an interesting stat in his corner.  Since he and his crew started patrolling, Police response times have improved – possibly to avoid the embarrassment of being beaten to the crime by a guy in a super hero costume.  Response times in Belltown on weekend nights were 29 minutes before Jones started his work.  How they are around 6.

You may not believe in vigilante justice.  But after hearing Phoenix Jones talk for 5 minutes, I believe the streets of Seattle are actually safer with him guarding them.

Many of you know, that I’ve been a partial Mariners season ticket holder since 1996, splitting great seats behind home plate with 5 other families.

Throughout the decade of losing, we’ve kept our seats, and I’ve kept my share.  We know it’s a waste of money.  We know they’ll be bad.  We know that our September tickets will be worth pennies on the dollar.  But we do it because we feel a sense of community with each other, our fellow season ticket holders and baseball overall.  Like good passive aggressive Seattleites, we allow the team to roll out a sub-par product, grumble a little and renew no matter what.

There is now a straw being waved around and threatening to break the camel’s back.

It’s one thing for the Mariners to fight to keep an arena out of Sodo.  It’s a little extreme, but I suppose still ok, for the Mariners to use the Seattle Times Editor in Chief to push anti-arena sentiment.  But when the County and City Councils vote to approve the arena, it’s another whole thing whatsoever to sponsor a “citizen’s referendum” with the hopes that the simple delay of getting something on the ballot will force the Sacramento Kings to be sold to another city.

Here’ is the letter I asked the head of my season ticket group to send to his ticket representative.  The upper executives of the Mariners do not care about you.  The people who care are the ones whose paychecks will be affected.  If you want to get a message inside the Golden Fortress, you need to hit the people who will immediately be affected financially.

My letter:

Ken:

Can you let your ticket guy know, that if the Mariners go through with any resolutions or referendums to try to stop the new Sodo Arena, after 16 years, I’ll be giving up my season ticket package next year.

I find it hypocritical for a franchise that solely exists thanks to a stadium paid for by $350MM in taxpayer dollars, would do anything to prevent a privately financed arena from bringing more sports to our marketplace.  Plus, let us not forget that the Sonics were here before the Mariners, and I don’t remember them trying to block a baseball team from coming to town.

Not only will I pull out of my tickets, I will encourage everyone I know to pour their money into franchises that are friendlier to the Seattle community.

Thanks.

Andy

And just like that, the old starts to make way for the new.

(Part 1 of a Series)

So let me preface this. I have no inside information. I know nothing, have talked to no one I reference and have absolutely no reason to believe any of what I am going to write is going to happen. It’s purely a wild speculation that will be fun to look back on if 10% of it comes true.

The overarching point is this: Bellevue is going to get an NBA and NHL team, and it’s going to start playing around 2015. Here are some details of this ridiculous notion.

1) The rich people who want an NBA team back here have figured out how to change the conversation. They are working to change the question from, “Should we or shouldn’t we have a World Class arena” to “Should our World Class Arena be in Seattle or Bellevue.” It’s a fantastic tactic. Get two equally powerful groups to wage a battle against each other.

2) Once you convince Bellevue that Seattle wants an Arena, the politicians in Bellevue start making things happen. It’s a once in a century opportunity that people with power can’t pass up. Seattle is at best in a plateau, and possibly declining in economic importance. Bellevue has Microsoft, Expedia, a financial district, a huge shopping district, and the chance to recruit over any of the major tech companies with small offices in Seattle. Insert a world class arena and you could make an argument that we call the region Seattle-Tacoma-Eastside. It could even be considered like the Twin Cities. Bellevue will do its part to make the Arena happen for the promise of concerts, the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, NCAA Sweet 16 games, the NCAA Women’s Final 4, NHL All-Star game and all the Justin Bieber you can take.

3) Now the mechanics. Let’s pick Anschutz Entertainment Group as the private sponsor who recognizes that a privately funded arena, backed by an Entertainment Group, can be hugely profitable. So Arena issue solved, provided they get tenants.

4) Tenant 1: The Tampa Bay Lightning move to Seattle. The Lightning were recently bought by a Harvard Biz School Investment Banker Jeffrey Vinik. Investment bankers keep score in dollar signs. And the CEO and minority owner of the Lighting is former Seahawks CEO Tod Liewicki. He knows this area. He’s bringing the team back here to share the spotlight with…

5) Tenant 2: Everyone knows this one. Steve Balmer leads the ownership group of the new NBA team. This happens once David Stern announces his retirement. Once the new guy steps in, he’ll need to make a bold move that gets his regime off on the right foot. And what would make him more popular with owners than to rip out a franchise that is losing money (ie the Hornets) and make the owners a bunch of money by selling it to a big city in a new arena with a Billionaire owner. Easy win.

6) A small thing to consider: The new light rail through Bellevue hits all the major MSFT headquarters, with a mysterious loop through a dead region of Bel-Red. Welcome to the future home of the new stadium.

That’s all I have towards this for now. More ideas to come later…

It’s hard to think back to 2008, back before the Seattle Sounders officially existed in anything more than everyone’s imagination.

The Sounders were to become the 16th team in a league with a couple of marquee names in David Beckham and Landon Donovan. LA, DC and Toronto were the only teams to draw more than 18k fans a game.

So when the Sounders announced that Xbox was going to commit $20 Million bucks to the team and the league, it really seemed like – and was – a large sum of money to risk.

But now as we look at the end of the 3rd year of the deal, it’s the Sounders who can’t wait for the contract to expire. Unfortunately for them, they still have 2 more years of the deal. When you look back, the Xbox media team made a heck of a deal.

At $20 Million over 5 years, you are looking at a deal that is only $4 million a year. For that 4 million Xbox got rights to the front of the jerseys, signage in all MLS stadiums, naming rights to Xbox Pitch at Qwest (then Century Link) Field, and TV spots on all broadcasts.

Let’s look at some of the other deals in the MLS (sourced from The Brotherly Game):

So if we assume the national value to the Sounders sponsor is roughly the same as the value any other team’s sponsor receives, the delta is in the value at home. So lets say maybe 1/2 – 2/3 the value is in national exposure, and 1/3 – 1/2 is in local. If that’s the case, then the national value is about $2 million for each team.

So in those terms, the local value of DC United’s sponsorship would be about $1 Million per year. For Salt Lake, it’s $3 Million per year. Now the 38,500 fans per game in Seattle just about doubles everyone but the #2 LA Galaxy at 23,000 per game. So if the Sounders drive 2x more fans than Salt Lake, and 2x the TV impressions, you’d have to estimate the local value is at least $6 Million per year (2x Salt Lake).

There are probably more scientific ways to figure this out, but we don’t have access to impression volumes, jersey sales and hard stats. And we haven’t included the premium that Xbox pays for being the local guys recruiting employees, and the international value of having the team play across Central America and Mexico, or the fact that they’ve gotten a smoking deal the last 3 years.

So let’s ballpark a number of $9 Million per year to start the new deal in 2014. ($2 Million National Value, $6 Million Local value, $1 Million Premium.) How does that look?

Can’t resist posting this ad promoting FIFA 12, starring Steve Nash and Hope Solo. Pretty funny stuff. Would love to have seen the actual shoot. (And I still don’t understand what you get when you cross a gorilla and a leopard….)

Last Friday, a Major League Baseball team did an unprecedented thing.  They celebrated another sports franchise.  Even odder, in this case, it was a former franchise.

The Seattle Mariners didn’t make any new friends in David Stern’s office by providing the city it’s first chance to collect 16 legends from a team that no longer exists, and get them together for a tribute.  And odd as it may seem, the Mariners may have been the most logical host for this type of party.

The Mariners were just entering Major League Baseball while the Sonics were having their first glory days in the late 1970′s.  And then the two teams shared the job of electrifying the sports community in the mid 1990′s.

So for 30 brief minutes, a baseball stadium full of Green and Gold celebrated what we miss about the Sonics.  We miss the people, the characters.  We miss guys with nicknames like The Glove, The Reign Man, Slick, X-Man, Sleepy Sam, the Hawk, and Downtown.  Guys who were recognizable by first name only – Nate, Lenny, Detlef, Dale, Bernie, Vincent and Desmond.  We miss Michael Cage’s giant afro, Jack Sikma’s freakishly large frame, and George Karl’s Space Needle tie.

I appreciate what Jack Zurencik and Pete Carroll are doing by flipping over the entire rosters of the M’s and Hawks.  But a team achieves cult status and hero worship when there’s a core group of players that you root for.  You wanted Gary to get a ring.  You knew that Hersey Hawkins could score 6 more points a night if he played somewhere else, but you loved he was bombing three’s for us.  There was something about George and Nate that made you think you could ask them to dinner and they’d say yes.

The Schultz led Sonics never quite got that.  And tellingly, no one from the last 5 years of the franchise were represented as a Sonics legend.  It’s true, we didn’t adore the 2003-2008 versions of the Sonics that got rid of Gary.  Ray Allen is the best 3 point shooter of all time, but he wasn’t Det.  Nene, Robert Swift, Jermoe James, insert big stiff here….. none of them were Cage, Brickowski, Sikma, Lister or Perkins.  When they left for OKC, we mourned the loss of the guys who didn’t actually play anymore.

I still don’t think we care all that much about bringing back a generic NBA Sonics club that looks like any other NBA club.  But that doesn’t make us miss “Our Sonics” any less.  Ask any sports fan in Seattle, and they can tell you where they watched Game 5 vs Denver, Game 7 vs Houston, Game 7 vs Phoenix and Game 7 vs Utah. You don’t even have to say the year.  We all just know what games you’re referring to.  There was a connection to those guys – not to the franchise, but to the guys – that made you happy when they won, hurt when you lost, and want to fight anyone from Phoenix.

So good for the Mariners for bringing back those guys.  I hope their front office took note.  It’s not about rally fires or a moose.  Bring in players who are also great characters, let us connect with them over a long period, and we’ll come back to Safeco.

Nobody asked me but…

I was recently asked the following. “So, after the lip surgery, funky knee thing, bizarre disc thing in your back, and freakazoid frostbite incident with the dry ice, did you finally accept that the fates are telling you to bail out of the 1/2 Marathon?”

Well, I’m actually THAT stubborn. I’m not bailing out.  I just stopped writing about the training.  

There’s no question that I’m going to be one of the slower perfromers.  I’ve done a few 8 mile runs so far, and it’s clear that while 13 miles will be doable, my time is not going to be impressive.

But with 2 weeks left, there’s still time for some slight improvements.  Barring any other “out of left field injuries,” look for some results here 2 weeks from today.

We had the chance last week to check out SAM Remix at the Seattle Art Museum.  Now, a few weeks ago, I complained about the lack of unique events in Seattle.  So of course, here comes the slew of unique events – SAM Remix being one.

If you haven’t checked out SAM Remix before, it’s definitely worth blowing a Friday night for.  You get to bundle together some cocktails, a trip through a cool exhibit, 1000 or so party revelers, and some wild cards, all in a single evening.  It happens every quarter, so I suggest you add it to your “date list.”

Anyway, I didn’t take pics from the party, but I did break every rule at SAM and took pics of the exhibit itself.  Apologies to both SAM and Nick Cave, but the exhibit was pretty cool and should be shared.