Maybe now it’s “Ma Bell Park”

I really liked the name “Pac Bell Park.” It’s the kind of coporate-sponsored stadium name that rolls off your tongue and makes you forget that it’s corporately sponsored. But in 2004, they changed the name to SBC Park when SBC Communications (formerly Southwestern Bell Corp), Pacific Bell’s parent, stopped using the name Pacific Bell. The name “SBC Park” was not as good.

And then recently, SBC bought AT&T and stopped using the name SBC (it’s now just AT&T). What’s a stadium with its naming rights contracted out through 2019 supposed to do? Well, they’re changing the name to AT&T Park, a name so bad that it’s four painful corporate syllables and can’t be thought of as anything but a phone company, unless you’re 117 years old and still remember that the last T in AT&T stands for Telegraph.

I think the moral of this story is that telecommunications companies change names more than baseball teams change uniforms. Oh, and AT&T Park needs a nickname, and I’m going with Ma Bell Park. That seems to be what SBC has always wanted to be anyway.