A $50 million payout from Major League Baseball last year has led to the Mariners for the first time sharing profits with a public authority overseeing their home stadium.
The $4.6 million the team is paying the stadium’s Public Facilities District (PFD) will go to upkeep and improvements in and around T-Mobile Park as per a profit-sharing mechanism the team negotiated back when the $517 million ballpark first opened in 1999 after being subsidized with $372 million in public funding. That profit-sharing could only be triggered once Mariners owners recovered $200 million in operating losses they say they sustained from July 1, 1995, through Oct. 31, 1999, during the team’s final Kingdome…
