This week the Portland Sea Dogs announced the city-owned baseball park the team has occupied since 1994 was getting a cumbersome, new corporate name.
“Beginning today, the facility located at 271 Park Avenue in Portland formerly known as Hadlock Field will now be Delta Dental Park,” a press release chirped.
Um, no it won’t.
For one thing, the announcement has brought swift and nearly universal condemnation online. Second, if Portland’s other pro sports venue is any indication, locals will go on calling the park by it’s old, unbranded name, whether the corporate overlords like it or not.
“This is the most stupid thing! Mr. Hadlock was a person to be honored, but now selling out to a company! It is so sad!,” wrote one commenter on the Sea Dogs’ Facebook page, with as many exclamation points as he could muster. “I am so sorry for the Hadlock family! It will always be Hadlock Field to me!”
The field was named for Edson Hadlock Jr., a beloved physics teacher and Portland High School baseball coach from 1956 to 1978. Hadlock was inducted into the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.
Another commenter, on Instagram, got right to the heart of what a lot of people are thinking about the city in general these days: “Portland is, not so slowly, losing its soul… Thanks to hipsters, prefab and greed.”
The Sea Dogs’ are not saying how much money they got for the naming rights.
Other online commenters simply wrote, “Gross,” “Bad,” “Shut up,” “Lame,” “Boooo,” and “Nope.”
A few pointed out that Delta Dental already bought the naming rights to the New Hampshire Fisher Cats’ home field in Manchester, New Hampshire. The Fisher Cats are Portland’s closest league rival — but they are owned by the same faceless corporation, Diamond Baseball Holdings.
“They did the same thing in Manchester for the Toronto affiliate,” one Instagram user wrote. “No one cares or calls it that mouth full.”
It’ll be the same here, I suspect.
When Maine corporate titan Cross Insurance bought the naming rights to the city’s venerable Cumberland County Civic Center in 2014, locals threw up in their mouths a little bit but have since gone right on calling it the “Civic Center,” as they’ve done since the hockey palace was built in 1977.
It turns out fans and locals have more civic pride than the headless, heartless capitalists with the mounds of cash to put their names on things.
Ever heard anyone in town say, “I’ll meet you at the Unum Entrance of the Cross Insurance Arena?”
I didn’t think so.
