Alaskan Wants To Use Oil Bounty To Buy M's, Keep Them In Seattle

The Seattle Mukluks? Pitchers throwing "snowballs"? A real moose instead of a guy in a costume?

The possibilities for Northwest baseball fans are endless - if Lee Stoops' dream comes true.

Stoops, in his own words, is just "an ordinary dad" from Juneau who loves baseball. He loves it so much he wants Alaskans to buy the Seattle Mariners, using $100 million from the $13 billion Alaska Permanent Fund, Alaska's savings account from the Prudhoe Bay oil rush.

Stoops is not some Tampa Bay baseball thief dressed in a furry parka. He has no intention of moving the Mariners to a field of dreams in the Alaskan tundra.

He just wants Alaskans to use the fund, which paid annual dividends of about $930 to every Alaskan last year, to buy something people in Alaska can relate to.

"This could be a wonderful thing for Alaskans; a lot of lives could be enriched," said Stoops, a real-estate agent. "The Mariners would stay in Seattle. The team would become the North Pacific Mariners."

He figures the club could show loyalty to its new owners by playing a few exhibition games in Anchorage.

Stoops has already contacted Mariner owner Jeff Smulyan.

"He was positive," Stoops said. "He said there has never been a (fully) publicly owned team, but that doesn't preclude us from doing it."

What does preclude Stoops is a key provision in Alaskan law that limits the fund's investments primarily to stocks, bonds and real estate, and even that only under certain conditions.

"It's possible but difficult," said Bob Maynard, deputy director of the Alaska Permanent Fund.

Such an investment would require 51 percent approval by legislators of a change in uses for the Permanent Fund.

"It's easier to block something than pass it," Maynard said, particularly if it involves the Permanent Fund.

Fortunately for Mariner fans, there are at least two other buyer groups said to be interested in purchasing the franchise.

The public-private panel trying to make such a purchase more attractive is still trying to raise $13 million a year in new revenues for the team.

The group, led by Seattle businessman Herman Sarkowsky, hopes to have written commitments for the money from local companies before a planned Feb. 4 meeting in New York between local politicians and baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent.

Letters were being sent out this week to companies that have verbally pledged to buy advertising on Mariner radio and television broadcasts for the next three years. Sarkowsky says he has raised $5 million in new advertising revenues but can't count on that money until the written pledges are returned.

Additionally, business leaders serving on the Sarkowksy panel have agreed to guarantee the purchase of 10,000 season tickets for the 1992 season, which brings $4 million a year to the effort.

A key member of the Sarkowsky panel, Seafirst Chairman Luke Helms, said that if Smulyan or another buyer commits to stay here all three years, the group likely will guarantee the same level - or better - of season-ticket sales in 1993 and 1994.

A cable-television deal, the third component of the package, would bring the franchise between $2 million and $3.6 million in new revenues, panel sources say.