On I-395 right by the Capitol, there is a huge billboard touting the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, Green Car Journal's "Vehicle of the Year".  Before that the same space was a General Motors billboard touting E85 / Flexfuel that read "Don't drill for fuel.  Grow it."  The whole Washington area is a magnet for that kind of lobbying, it's sad to see that the new ballpark is being sucked into that in a big way.

The original owners' rationale for creating professional baseball was to take people's minds off real issues.  (This is well documented, research it for yourself if you don't believe me.)  Professional sports, at least in the U.S., have always been disgustingly commercial, but like everything else in a decadent world, they're getting more commercial all the time.  Announcers can barely open their mouths for a second now without whoring for some corporation, as every comment seems to be sponsored by someone.

Sports and media people will claim that they need this sponsorship in order to pay their massive expenses.  This is true to an extent, but if the teams were owned by their cities instead of individuals or corporations, the voters of those cities could decide how much to spend on the teams and on media.  Moreover, with public ownership the salaries of the  grossly overpaid athletes, who became that way due to the grossly greedy owners, could be reigned in, profits could be reduced and/or go to the community instead of an owner's pocket, and no city would lose its team unless it voted to do so.

I spent a large part of my childhood, through high school, playing baseball, hockey, tennis, football, and skiing.  Afterward I spent many hours riding horses, and in my somewhat old age (after 40) I got into sailing enough to sail from San Francisco to Tahiti and back via Hawaii.  I think playing sports is  great.  Doing so is humans' way of playing without fighting, as other animals do, and represents one of the very few positive accomplishments humans have achieved.

Unfortunately, those of us who played a lot when we were younger tend to get caught up watching the sports we used to play, playing again vicariously through the current athletes.  The owners of sports teams and commercial media take advantage of this to both make a lot of money and to take people's minds off real issues.  So that's the problem here; it's not that the team is being hypocritical, it's just being like every other professional sports team.