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Just before the 8:20 a.m. Amtrak Cascades from Portland, Ore. pulled into Seattle on Friday at the start of All-Star Week, it passed the Starbucks headquarters on Utah Avenue and the massive Seattle Mariners flag flying above it.
Compared to the roughly five days of baseball branding that followed, it was subtle.
Seattle’s King Street Station was besieged by all things All-Star. Just to its west, a parking lot at Lumen Field—home to the National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks and Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders—was home to a collection of brand tents, trailers and tchotchkes known as Play Ball Park … brought to you by Capital One. At Lumen Field itself, Nike set up a stage for Major League Baseball’s Draft while other brands set up batting cages and small baseball diamonds.
The stadium’s event center mixed Major League Baseball attractions, like the world’s largest ball and traveling history exhibits, with brand display booths. Finally, to the south of it all, T-Mobile Park awaited the HBCU Swingman Classic (presented by T-Mobile), the Futures Game (SiriusXM), the Celebrity Softball Game (Corona), the Home Run Derby (T-Mobile) and the All-Star Game (Mastercard).
But I headed north, past the MLB-sponsored murals in RailSpur Alley, past the wiffle-ball games and drink tents in Occidental Square, beyond the Booking.com and T-Mobile All-Star billboards dotting 1st Avenue and Pike Street. Three hours on one of Amtrak’s longest-tenured Cascades cars left me in need of a quick wardrobe change and a much-needed reset before diving into the heavily branded abyss.
All-Star Week is one of MLB’s few certainties: The date is fixed, the location is planned in advance and regular-season play can’t alter much about it, aside from who’s playing and coaching. Seattle officials expected more than 100,000 people to visit the city for All-Star Week alone, and MLB has expanded the event to give those crowds a piece of the action. That’s created more space for brands as well, and they had no issue filling it.
Brands in the bullpen
At All-Star Week’s opening event—T-Mobile’s HBCU Swingman Classic—the brands took a backseat, if only for a night. Student athletes from schools piled out of the stadium’s Diamond Club on its field level and took photos with an illuminated mural of Hall of Famer and Seattle legend Ken Griffey Jr. blowing bubble gum.