Japanese Exec Leads Bid for Seattle Team

The Seattle Marios?

A group of investors led by the president of Nintendo Co. of Japan on Thursday announced a $100-million offer to buy the Seattle Mariners baseball team.

However, Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said it is “unlikely foreign investors would receive the requisite . . . approvals” from the team owners.

The bid was announced at a Seattle press conference bristling with political and corporate notables. It came against a backdrop of increasingly bitter feelings about Japanese investments and business efforts in the United States.

With the issue such a sore point, the bidding group believed that it was necessary to make the offer public “so it wouldn’t be prematurely released without full understanding,” a spokesman said. There have been numerous news stories about possible Japanese involvement in a bid for the team, which owner Jeff Smulyan put up for sale at $100 million.

The investing group, which calls itself The Baseball Club of Seattle, took pains to say that the Nintendo executives were invited to invest and that they intend the investment as an act of community spirit. Nintendo of America Inc., the Kyoto video game maker’s U.S. subsidiary, is based in Seattle’s Redmond suburb and employs 1,400 there. Nintendo makes popular video games including Super Mario Bros.

The family of Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of the parent company in Japan, would have a 60% stake in the team if the bid succeeds. Yamauchi’s son-in-law, Nintendo of America President Minoru Arakawa, a 15-year resident of the Pacific Northwest, would manage the investment, a spokesman said.

Other investors in the group--all with ties to the cream of the Seattle-area business community--are Christopher R. Larson of Microsoft Corp.; John McCaw Jr., a director of McCaw Cellular Communications Inc.; John W. Ellis, chairman and chief executive of Puget Sound Power and Light Co., and Frank Shrontz, chairman and chief executive of Boeing Co.

Mariners spokesman Dave Aust said Smulyan would not react to the offer until it is presented to him. “Questions of foreign ownership are for Major League Baseball to decide,” he added.

Vincent, in a terse statement Thursday afternoon, said: “Baseball has addressed the issue of ownership of its franchises and has developed a strong policy against approving investors from outside the United States and Canada.”

But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), who approached Arakawa last month to invite him into the investing group, predicted that the sale would go through. He said the precedent against non-U.S. ownership was broken when Canadian investors bought the Toronto Blue Jays and Montreal Expos.

Japanese investments in such “trophy” properties as Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach golf course have been controversial for years, but feelings have sharpened lately. On Wednesday, bowing to an intense political backlash, a Los Angeles County panel canceled a contract with Japanese-owned Sumitomo Corp. of America to build rail cars for the new Metro Green Line public transit system.

Steve Clemons, executive director of the Japan America Society of Southern California, called the timing of the baseball bid “unfortunate,” adding: “I can’t remember as bad an emotional pit between the U.S. and Japan as we’re in today.”