BASEBALL, like Pokemon, is a game of complexities.

And so is the game of stadium blackmail, as practiced this past decade in nearly every major-league city except Green Bay.

Seattle’s sports-team owners (all of whom are now either based here or have strong local business ties) have been among the deftest practitioners of the arena-finance game. Sonics boss Barry Ackerley first assembled land south of the Kingdome for his proposed “New Seattle Arena,” then struck a deal with the city to build KeyArena on the existing Seattle Center Coliseum site–and to make it too small for NHL hockey.

Seahawks owner Paul Allen got a statewide vote on subsidies for his new football palace to replace the Dome, thus ensuring the Hawks’ fans in the working-stiff counties beyond Seattle would get to put the measure over the top.

The Nintendo-led consortium running the Mariners narrowly lost a county vote to get new-ballpark bucks; then, after one winning season in ’95, went to the state Legislature to set up a Public Facilities District–a taxing authority with no other function than to build America’s most expensive ballpark on Ackerley’s former “New Seattle Arena” site.

And what a park it is. A sliding “retractable roof.” Luxury boxes and way-costly “seat license” sections (still not sold out as of this writing). All the high-tech comforts, snuggled within that retro-industrial look that’s all the rage among the George Will-readin’ pseudo-intellectuals in baseball land.

And, thanks to the team’s amenity demands and its mandated fast two-year construction schedule, $100 million in cost overruns (almost twice what the Kingdome cost some 23 years ago).

When the PFD scheme was announced, the team owners pledged to pay any construction costs over and above what the PDF’s taxes were expected to bring in.

Now, as the new stadium (complete with the paid-for name “Safeco Field”) is about to open, the team’s come back to the PFD wanting more money.

Rabid newspaper letter-writers and talk-radio callers seem to think the team’s asking for new and additional taxing schemes. The team’s attorneys claim they merely want the PFD to sell more construction bonds, based on additional bucks the already in-place taxes are expected to generate over the next 20 years (on restaurant meals, car rentals, lottery tickets, etc.) that, thanks to the economic boom, will be as much as $60 million higher than originally estimated–or so the team claims.

What do I think? Corporate sports is finally reaching the end of its ridiculousness limit. Some of the annual “Whither Baseball?” essays in the papers this April said teams are running out of cities to threaten to move to; even big-market teams are having trouble keeping up with Yankee/Dodger spending levels; and ever-splintering network ratings mean TV revenues for baseball won’t grow much more. No matter how this current Safeco Field impasse is resolved, it’ll likely be one of the last debacles of its type.

But for the here-‘n’-now, I think the PFD bureaucrats are right to tell the team to hold off. Despite what the purveyors of no-load mutual funds might wish you to believe, a booming economy today doesn’t mean there’ll be an even-booming-er economy for the indefinite future.

Tomorrow:Remembering the maybe-not-so-bad-in-retrospect old days of stagflation and Watergate.