Are you a Major League Baseball fan? Even if you’re not, you’ll love this tour. Safeco Field offers a variety of tours. For just $7 ($5 for children), you can take a 60-90 minute tour “behind the scenes.” We’ve done this a few times and always learn something new every time we go. For the general tour, we learned all about the history of the Mariners, and saw the ins and outs of running things at such a huge venue. We were a small group, made up of six in our family, a couple of Japanese exchange students we had with us, and half a dozen Japanese tourists. The smaller group size meant that there was a lot of personal attention. The highlight for our guests was getting to sit in Ichiro’s seat in the dugout and have their photos taken (no, not with him). Misuki explained to us that it was going to be something that was talked about extensively in her high school when she got back home. Because the Mariners’ majority owner is Nintendo, many Japanese follow them and Ichiro is their very own “hometown hero”. My favorite part of the tour was getting to sit in the owner’s box. It’s incredibly lush.
Since we were the only tour on that day, our guide let them run the bases. Our 60-minute tour was closer to 100 minutes. If you make reservations in advance, ask which day Bob will be working. He’s the best tour guide they have.
I learned a lot about the Mariners on the tour. One of the most interesting things to me was that regardless of their performance in any season, they are always profitable. Part of that is probably the high ticket prices (Paul just shelled out $200 for a couple of home-plate tickets for my son’s birthday), but I’m sure a lot has to do with good management as well.
For $7, this is hard to beat for an afternoon outing.