AN OPEN LETTER TO MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

Thank you, Major League Baseball, for deciding to "scale back" your joint promotion with Columbia Pictures, which was to have placed Spider-Man 2 logos on the bases used during interleague games played June 11-13.

Don't think I didn't notice, though, that ads will still appear in the on-deck circles during these games. In fact, the most cynical part of me believes you never intended to use those Spider-Man 2 bases. You knew the fans would rebel against ads on bases, so you floated the idea with the intent of retracting it and saying, "Okay, we'll only put ads in the on-deck circles." That way you could claim sensitivity to the fans' needs while still selling off part of the field for your crummy advertising.

Well, I'm drawing a line, Major League Baseball. You can keep your public-address ads, and your Jumbotron ads, and your outfield signs, and your virtual ads behind home plate, and your stadiums named after bankrupt corporations and pet-food stores. But I will never watch, either in person or on television, a baseball game where advertising appears on the field, even if it's only in the on-deck circles.

I know where you're heading with this, which is why it needs to stop now. You won't rest until you can sell advertising on the players' uniforms, will you? You already did so this season, when the Yankees and Devil Rays wore advertising patches and helmet decals for the season opener in Japan. All of this other fuss just serves to foster a creeping tolerance in us weary fans until the day our favorite teams take the field looking like NASCAR drivers. But I promise you this: the day you place ads on the uniforms will be the day I stop being a baseball fan.

Let me help you understand something, Major League Baseball. Many of us watch baseball to escape our daily lives. Some things in our daily lives we like to escape are pop-up ads, spam, TV commercials, radio ads, newspaper ads, junk mail, telemarketers, billboards, and the rest of the relentless advertising that saturates our lives. So we like to eat hot dogs and drink light beer and yell at men throwing a ball around a large lawn, and for a few hours celebrate that germ of something pure and noble at the heart of baseball. Oh, I know this sounds precious and naive to people like you, for whom baseball is a money-making venture. But when you place advertising on the field and on the uniforms, you make baseball seem less like an escape and more like ordinary life, which we can live for free at home.

I propose a deal, Major League Baseball. You can continue to have our money as long as you allow us to maintain our illusions about the game we've entrusted to you. That's a marketing strategy that's worked for over a century. Don't screw it up now.

+posted by Lawrence @ 5/06/2004 11:49:00 PM