The (deputy) director's cut

The other night I went to the new Washington Nationals baseball stadium for the first time, on a beautiful summer evening for a game.  Upon taking in my first view of the facility I was immediately impressed.  I was especially charmed upon discovering that it was a LEED-certified “green” ballpark, the first of its kind in Major League Baseball.

I proceeded to my seats on the first base side, with a great view of the playing field.  I was taking in the sights and sounds of America’s favorite pastime, when I looked across the field and saw it.

The ExxonMobil brand, plastered on the left field wall.

Mr. Richardson, your beautiful carriage will now be turning into a pumpkin.  And the magic castle in which you find yourself is about to turn to sand.

Part of my sinking disappointment can be traced to the boyish naivete with which I hold major league baseball as something pure and inherently good.  Anyone who reads the papers knows that such is far from the case.  But I somehow manage to keep such realities locked away in a separate compartment as I avidly follow the sport year after year.  

That said, I can only block out so much.  

Exxon is the proverbial final straw, the worst of the worst.  They boast a long list of corporate deadly sins, from abetting human rights abuses in Indonesia to ripping up Canadian old growth forests so they can squeeze oil from sand, to funding front groups who misleadingly question the scientific consensus that global warming is real.  To see their logo plastered on a major league ballpark, and a “green” one at that, was like finding a tragic tear in an otherwise beautiful work of art.

But the childlike baseball fan within me is strong and wields rationalization as well as anyone, so I managed to put Exxon aside once the game began and became consumed by the play on the field.  It was a tight game midway through the 7th inning, which any good baseball fan knows is the part of the game marked by a traditional break in the action known as the seventh inning stretch.

At which point the loudspeakers blurted, “This seventh inning stretch brought to you by ExxonMobil”.

My inner baseball fan has just been ripped out, beaten senseless and unceremoniously kicked to the curb.

If you think about it, though, it actually makes sense.  Who better to sponsor this aspect of the game than the corporation that’s turned stretching things out into an art form.  For 19 years, Exxon has managed to stretch out the lawsuit brought against it for the 11 million gallons of oil its tanker the Valdez spilled into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989.

It all came full circle yesterday, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision regarding punitive damages for the spill.  The high court (interpret that as you wish) effectively rewarded Exxon’s 19-year stretch by slashing an original $5 billion punitive damage assessment down to $500 million.  So the fishermen and other adversely affected Alaskans will get roughly $15,000 each as restitution for having their livelihoods shattered almost two decades ago.  While the richest corporation on the planet (in February Exxon posted the highest quarterly profits in US corporate history, to the tune of $11.7 billion), is being forced to pay the ratio equivalent of a speeding ticket.  

If Exxon can stretch out a lawsuit brought on by disenfranchised Americans and save itself $4.5 billion as a result, it can definitely sponsor a seventh inning stretch at a baseball game.  It’s like the Bush administration sponsoring a dance competition called the Texas Side Step.  Exxon’s getting plenty of help these days, with the Supreme Court’s error, the legal system’s forced play to keep the underdogs from scoring and the bad call at the plate by the Nationals organization when it let Exxon’s sponsorship contaminate its stadium.

Looks like the fix is in.