Owners Are Rethinking Ban : Baseball: Controversy over Japanese-backed offer to buy the Seattle Mariners brings to light rules recently adopted by committee.

The leadership of Major League Baseball is rethinking a recently adopted prohibition against foreign ownership of franchises, Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said Tuesday, in light of the controversy over a Japanese-backed offer to buy the Seattle Mariners.

Vincent said it will be “difficult” for the proposed sale of the team to be approved under current rules that were quietly adopted by an ownership committee in December.

“There is a policy, and there are principles,” Vincent said at a news conference following a meeting Tuesday with Seattle and Washington state civic leaders. “In light of those principles, it is my judgment that a transaction of this sort would not be approved. ... We have thought about (foreign ownership) and we have found it difficult.”

But Vincent conceded that the prohibition is complicated in this case because the Japanese-born businessman leading the $100 million offer -- Nintendo of America Inc., President Minoru Arakawa -- has lived in the Seattle area for 15 years and appears to satisfy baseball’s key requirement that teams be locally owned.

“The issue of applying this policy (of no foreign ownership) in the context of this application may be difficult,” Vincent said. “The policy has all sorts of questions of interpretation.”

And Deputy Commissioner Steve Greenberg acknowledged in an interview that “the ground has shifted” in the weeks since the policy was adopted-in part because of the emergence of the offer for the Mariners. “What appeared to be an absolute prohibition in December is now being considered by the ownership committee,” Greenberg said.

The two-week-old Japanese offer to buy the money-losing Seattle team has quickly become the focal point of the current climate of Japan-bashing in the United States, with many Americans resenting the idea of foreign ownership of part of the National Pastime. One recent survey found 71 percent of the American people opposed to the idea of the sale of the Mariners to the Nintendo group, which also includes several prominent U.S.-born Seattle business leaders.

A handful of minor league baseball clubs already are Japanese owned, and a Japanese ownership group recently took control of the National Hockey League’s expansion franchise in Tampa.

The Nintendo offer is backed by $60 million provided by Arakawa’s father-in-law, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo Inc., the Japanese parent of the U.S. videogame company. Arakawa, however, would run the team, seemingly meeting baseball’s demand for local control. Yamauchi would provide another $15 million of the $25 million that would be used to fund the team’s operating expenses.

The offer is seen as the last best chance to keep the Mariners in Seattle. The team’s current owner, radio entrepreneur Jeff Smulyan, has been all but financially ruined by the cash-strapped franchise, and if he cannot sell the team, he might have to declare bankruptcy or, more likely, seek baseball’s permission to move the franchise to the more lucrative Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., market.

Tuesday’s meeting with Seattle officials, in fact, was to discuss a proposed package from Seattle business leaders to add $13 million a year in advertising, ticket and broadcast money to the Mariners’ revenue to make the team more financially viable, regardless of who owns it.

“We think we have the solid foundation to support this team,” Seattle Mayor Norman Rice said. “The final critical piece will be the approval of a new local, financially solid ownership.” Tuesday’s meeting did not deal with the Nintendo offer, but Rice and other Seattle officials have made it clear they strongly favor the bid.

When the Nintendo offer first was made, Vincent seemed to reject it out of hand, but then he and other baseball officials seemed to back off their hardline positions after criticism by sports and business columnists around the country.

The formal proposal from the Nintendo group has been submitted to baseball’s ownership committee, which consists of eight owners -- most of them among the game’s most powerful, wealthy men -- and the presidents of the American and National leagues. The group will make a recommendation about the Nintendo offer to the full 26-team ownership group, which is expected to vote on the bid in early March.

However, Vincent said that same ownership committee considered and rejected the idea of foreign ownership-actually, non-North American ownership, as the Toronto Blue Jays and Montreal Expos are owned by Canadian groups-before the Seattle situation arose.

“The issue came up in baseball a year ago,” Vincent said, emphasizing that the question was not specifically about Japanese ownership of teams. He said one owner, whom the commissioner declined to identify, asked him about a possible offer from a European bidder. Also, there was Japanese interest in buying a piece of the New York Yankees.

Vincent said he discussed the idea with several owners over the past year and that the ownership committee passed a resolution in December barring foreign ownership. Part of the rationale, he said, had to do with baseball’s desire that teams be locally owned.

“The real concern was not for the game of baseball,” Vincent said. “It goes to the issue of the preference within the ownership of baseball, a strong preference, I think, for local ownership.” The ownership committee’s resolution was presented to, but not voted on by, baseball’s other owners at the winter meetings in early December, according to Greenberg.

Vincent acknowledged that Arakawa’s longtime Seattle residence seemed to contradict the spirit of the resolution. “The question is, can you be a foreign citizen and still be a strong local owner?” he said.