Two articles from today's NYTimes not in the Sports section... From the Metro section... November 14, 2006 NYC Field of Honor Becomes Field of Dollars By CLYDE HABERMAN William A. Shea at the 1964 ceremony naming the Mets’ stadium for him. The Mets’ new stadium is to be called Citi Field. William Alfred Shea was off by a decade and a half. He once predicted that 15 minutes after he died, his name would be taken off the Queens stadium where the New York Mets play baseball. It took 15 years instead. But Mr. Shea got the big picture right. Nothing lasts forever, certainly not a name on the facade of a ballpark, certainly not when huge bucks are at stake and corporate egos need nourishing. For 42 years, the Mets’ home field has been called Shea Stadium. It is called that for a reason: to honor Mr. Shea, never mind that ever-shrinking numbers of the team’s fans have a clue who he was. Mr. Shea, who died in 1991 at 84, was a lawyer and a power broker. He, as much as anyone, brought National League baseball back to a bereft city after the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants took a powder in 1957. The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club Inc. came into being in 1961. When it moved into a new home of its own in 1964, it made sense to many to name the home Shea Stadium. It was an honor in the dictionary definition of the word: high regard or great respect. It is an honor that has now become a casualty of modern business. Yesterday, the Mets made it official that their new playground, rising next to the old one in Flushing Meadows, will not be called Shea Stadium. The new name is Citi Field, in obeisance to Citigroup, the banking titan. Citigroup has entered into a 20-year partnership with the ball club and, news reports have it, will give the team $20 million a year. That is a fair-size chunk of change (even if it would not fully cover the annual salary of New York’s highest-paid ballplayer, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees, who proves every October that he could not hit water if he fell off a pier). In exchange for its millions, Citigroup receives naming rights. Naming rights are not to be confused with honor. Honor is something bestowed upon you. It is not something that you can insist is your due. A company name spread above the front door on demand is a billboard. To appreciate the concept of honor, you need look no farther than across the elevated tracks of the No. 7 train running alongside Shea Stadium. On the other side of the tracks lie a tennis center named for Billie Jean King and stadiums bearing the names of Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong. In that way, those giants of sports and music are honored. They did not pay for the privilege. Putting up money without receiving a billboard in return is an alien concept in corporate America today. You don’t like it? Well, get real, said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who used to run an information services company that he named for himself. “The real world is that you have to have a naming opportunity and sell it for a lot of money if you can afford a stadium in this day and age,” the mayor said yesterday after a ceremonial groundbreaking for Citi Field. Fred Wilpon, the Mets’ principal owner, made a similar point. “It is imperative that we receive revenues,” he said. None of the 10 people who spoke yesterday, mostly politicians and business executives, mentioned William Shea in their prepared remarks. Only after reporters asked later about the name change did Mr. Wilpon allow that “we will honor Bill Shea somewhere in this stadium.” Where, exactly? Who knows? But Shea family members take Mr. Wilpon at his word. They also accept the loss of their name with equanimity. If Citigroup money helps the team, then “it’s absolutely fantastic,” said Kathy Shea Anfuso, a daughter of William Shea. Much the same was said by a grandson, F. Scott Shea. As for the fading of the family name, so be it. “How can you be grumpy about something that’s been so fabulous for 40 years, 45 years?” Ms. Anfuso, who lives in Portland, Ore., said by phone. Scott Shea, a real estate lawyer in Los Angeles, was less than thrilled with the name Citi Field. Sounds “like an abandoned dump site out by the airport,” he said in a telephone interview. But he added, “having said that, I truly don’t believe the name on the door or the facade really matters that much; it’s what’s inside the walls of the new ballpark that counts.” The Mets are betting that fans will feel the same way in time, despite some inevitable grumbling now. That seems a safe bet. All that most fans want is a winning team. But it does not mean they can’t tell the difference between an honor and a billboard. E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com From the Business section... November 14, 2006 Advertising The Mets’ New Marquee Name By STUART ELLIOTT One rendering of the Mets’ new stadium, Citi Field, has no trace of Citigroup’s present umbrella logo. Experts in the realms of sports marketing, corporate identity and brand building are offering sharply divergent views of the value of the huge deal that will name the new ballpark of the New York Mets for Citigroup. The agreement, announced formally yesterday, will label the Mets’ new stadium, scheduled to open in spring 2009, Citi Field. The current ballpark, Shea Stadium, is named after William A. Shea, a lawyer who helped bring National League baseball back to New York after the Dodgers and Giants left for the West Coast. To designate the new stadium Citi Field, Citigroup is agreeing to pay more than $20 million a year for at least 20 years, published reports estimate, making the deal the most lucrative one in the United States for what is known as naming rights. The experts, however, raised questions about whether New York baseball fans, famous — or notorious, depending upon your point of view — for their feisty opinions, will welcome a sponsored name or spurn it, complaining, “Shea it ain’t so!” Although corporate names have been familiar features of the sports landscape around the country, the Mets are becoming the first major team in New York in the big four sports (baseball, basketball, football, hockey) to name its home after a marketer. “There are definite dangers,” said Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of an organization called the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which seeks to help advertisers understand how consumer chat about a brand or product can affect sales and reputation. “The risk of word-of-mouth backlash, especially among die-hard loyals, is significant,” Mr. Sernovitz said, noting the novelty of the corporate naming for the New York sports market and the fact that “there are such historic, personal feelings about Shea Stadium and the name.” “If it’s ‘The Man has bought your stadium,’ it’s hard to get warm feelings out of that,” Mr. Sernovitz said. He added that he would recommend that Citigroup offset that by trying to “show some respect” and that it acknowledge the potential pitfalls of the naming. Among the steps that Mr. Sernovitz suggested Citigroup should consider were “a ceremony inviting people to say goodbye to Shea” and “taking the old sign on tour, bringing it to Times Square” and other public gathering places. Robert K. Passikoff, president at Brand Keys, a brand and customer loyalty research company in New York, also pointed out that “hard-core fans, whether it’s New York or San Diego, resent stadiums changing their names,” because “they feel it adulterates what they see as pure and clean and all-American” about baseball. “You’ll have a portion of the consumer base that is going to be resentful,” Mr. Passikoff warned. The Mets have played in Shea Stadium since 1964. Before that, they played for two seasons in the Polo Grounds, the former home of the New York Giants, while waiting for Shea to be completed. The owners of the Mets, the Wilpon family, are replacing Shea with the new ballpark, being built next to Shea in Flushing, Queens, partly because of complaints that Shea is outdated. “Mets fans, as much as they complain about Shea, have grown attached to the name,” said Jim Andrews, editorial director of IEG Sponsorship Report, a newsletter published in Chicago. So “there certainly will be some backlash” against Citi Field, he added. A discussion about the name change on a sports blog, DeadSpin (deadspin.com), reflected divided opinions among fans. While several attacked the new name, not all the DeadSpin readers were upset, judging by some of their comments. “I could care less about the name as long as the stadium has good sightlines,” wrote a reader who posted under the name Critic. “And beer.” Another reader, posting under the name Brad Lee, joked that “the new musical theme for the Mets is ‘We Built This Citi.’ ” Similarly, some experts said they saw positive aspects to the arrival of Citi Field onto the New York sports scene. “Because it’s New York, and because Citigroup is such an enormous business in the New York area, it’s a perfect marriage for the New York Mets,” said David Bialek, president at the ANC Sports Marketing division of ANC Sports Enterprises in Purchase, N.Y. As for the novelty of an advertiser’s name getting top billing in New York, “I think fans are accustomed to this type of commercialization,” Mr. Bialek said. “There no longer exists the anger or animosity that existed when these deals first began.” In fact, “I would suggest Mets fans would look at the size of the deal with pride: ‘The Mets are deserving of $20 million a year,’ ” Mr. Bialek said. John Fraser, executive vice president at Element 79 Sports in Chicago, part of the Element 79 agency owned by the Omnicom Group, said the fact that the marketer’s name was being affixed to a new field may ameliorate any hard feelings about the disappearance of the Shea Stadium name. “It’s easier to get fans and media to use a name if it’s a new entity,” Mr. Fraser said, adding, “If you’re lucky, you can get a cool nickname like the Cell or the Bob.” His references were to the diminutives that developed over time for the ballparks of two other baseball teams: U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, home of the White Sox, and Bank One Ballpark, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks (now Chase Field because J. P. Morgan Chase acquired Bank One). Bob Dorfman, executive vice president and creative director at Pickett Advertising in San Francisco, who tracks the value of professional athletes as endorsers, said: “Ten years ago, it was, ‘You’re destroying the purity of the game.’ Now, they say, ‘We can afford more money to buy a better team.’ ” “Certainly there will be die-hard Mets fans who will be up in arms” about the corporate name, he said, “but it would be more of a big deal if it were the Yankees.” (For the record, the New York Yankees, also building a stadium to open in 2009, say they plan to reuse the Yankee Stadium name.) At a news conference yesterday at Shea Stadium, Lewis B. Kaden, chief administrative officer at Citigroup, said the relationship with the Mets would extend beyond naming rights to other initiatives. He suggested that Citigroup might take advantage of the Mets’ popularity in Latin America and Japan, where Citigroup has bank branches and issues credit cards. Steven J. Freiberg, co-chairman of the Citigroup global consumer group, said the company could also use Citi Field as a showcase for new technologies like contactless payments, which enable shoppers to buy merchandise using specialized bank cards or payment tags. (Anything to reduce the length of the beer lines.) The naming deal comes as Citigroup is doing a lengthy review of its companywide brand strategy, looking at ways to unify its image; the review includes the well-known umbrella logo. Some posters depicting Citi Field at the news conference were missing the umbrella; others showed a red curve over the “Citi” part of “Citi Field.” No decision about the future of the umbrella has been made, Mr. Freiberg said. Eric Dash contributed reporting.
