Yes, Guaranteed Rate Field, the new name, as of next season, of the stadium at which the White Sox will play their homes games, is a clunker. What else is new? The nation is crummy with clunky sounding venue sponsorships — Chesapeake Energy Arena, Quicken Loans Arena, Smoothie King Center, anyone? — and because the media offer no resistance to this trend, fans ultimately adopt and get used to the new names in some form.
I’d like it if print and broadcast outlets would discourage the ever-louder static of this sort of commercialism by referring only generically to the locations of games — “Sox park” or “the Bulls’ home arena,” for example — unless they’re paid for sponsorship mentions.
But since that will never happen, I have to hit pause on my expressions of mockery and disgust to acknowledge what a genius move this deal was for officials with Chicago-based Guaranteed Rate.
However many millions they’re spending to snag naming rights for U.S. Cellular Field for the next 13 years, they’ve already made a good chunk of it back in free publicity for the fast-growing mortgage-lending firm, a firm whose name most of us had never heard of before it rocketed around the internet Wednesday. But Guaranteed Rate will now be near the top of our minds whenever the conversation turns to mortgages.
