Cisco at Bat

6:00 PM -- Cisco and the Oakland Athletics today announced glorious plans to build the team a new stadium in Fremont, Calif., called Cisco Field. (See Cisco Helps Build Ballpark.)

Cisco will sell the A's 143 acres to build the stadium, and will have naming rights for 30 years. The deal will make Cisco a household name in all households of major league baseball fans, no doubt to the consternation of Brocade and Cisco's many networking competitors.

While we hate to rain on Cisco's parade, we can't help but point out executives from corprorations getting involved with pro-sports teams sometimes end up in the police blotter as well as the sports section. Exhibit A is Enron, which owned naming rights to the Houston Astros' stadium before mucking things up good.

Jock-sniffing tech execs have had their share of problems as well:

Nobody's saying John Chambers and Cisco execs will follow this crooked path. But for some reason, corporations doing business with sports teams always seem to get caught stealing.Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch