Did anyone notice in today’s Red Sox Athletics game in the Toyko Dome that players from both sides were walking billboards for Pepsi, Quiznos, EMC 2 and others. There were more patches on the players’ uniforms for commercial space than on the wall of the stadium.
I think this is a worse sell out than the steroid scandal.
Major League Baseball should lose its anti-trust exemption over this.
As the late, great George Frazier would have said…
“D-I-S-G-U-S-T-I-N-G.”
Please share widely!
Still a tad upset because noone will rent that sign on your back? lol .. So, whats wrong with a little advertising to help round off that sporting fever? Personly I loved it when they started selling the rights to name the stadiums. I cant wait till the day when they rename Fenway to FloMax Field. That will be just the right touch me thinks ….
FloMax would give a whole new meaning to the old 7’th Inning Stretch… đŸ˜‰
The exemption is already a scam. MLB is a business and it rents lots of advertising.
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p>Personally, I’d like to see colorful ads all over the green monster and uniforms like NASCAR hoods.
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p>It would remind people not to make a religion out of an entertainment biz (one I enjoy a lot, btw).
Anybody who can hire some good players and rent a stadium should get a chance to compete. The UK doesn’t grant a monopoly to its sports teams, and they do fine over there. London has more than 10 professional teams.
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p>Seriously, good teams like the Sox and Celtics and Patriots would have nothing to worry about.
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p>But surely there is enough untapped coaching and athletic talent out there that some town like LA or Las Vegas could form a team and do better than the Dolpins or the Rams.
My impossible dream is to have an open market for clubs and a promotion/relegation system here, at least in baseball.
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p>Make the minor leagues independent, boot the Royals and the Brewers down to AAA, and give the Buffalo Bisons and the Columbus Clippers a shot at the bigs!
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p>But alas like so much of our high-level private sector, the last thing current ownership wants is a free market.
However, it’s pretty standard in Japan. (In fact, some of the team names- like Dice-K’s old team, the Seibu Lions- actually have the names of their sponsors or corporate owners in them. Seibu is a company, not a place.)
MLB was doing a “when-in-Rome” type of thing. Besides, ads have always been a part of baseball. Here’s a couple of old pics of Fenway:
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p>There are plenty of reasons to do away with MLB’s anti-trust exemption. For one it’s anti-capitalist. Second, it’s unnecessary- the last time a start-up league as a whole had any real success in any sport was the AFL. (OK, I’m sure there’s a few Hartford Whaler and Phoenix Suns fans who might say otherwise…) However, ads on uniforms isn’t a reason to do away with the exemption.
Getting my NBA Western Conference teams mixed-up.
That was a bad idea, and it was fun to watch it fall apart.
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p>At least the NBA is thinking of bringing back the practice of teams in weird places, thinking of de-camping from Seattle for Oklahoma City.
Love those old monster pics.
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p>One of the most annoying things about Boston in general is the fake old-timey purity nonsense. It crops up everywhere.