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Wednesday, May 05, 2004Monistat 7 presents your Anaheim AngelsI'm not what you could call a "baseball traditionalist," but the growing commercialism of the game is starting to get me a little worried. We all saw the Yankee's pinstripes violated by gigantic RICOH patches on the sleeves, and now we have this. Anyone who's a soccer fan has seen the worst of the commercialization of sports. Many soccer jerseys are nothing more then moving ad boards on which everything that represents the club is relegated to tiny patches over the heart. Once I was watching a match between Arsenal and some other club, and my mother thought that the club's name was the "Dreamcast Arsenal", as if Dreamcast was a city somewhere outside London. I can't blame her though, just check out the jerseys Arsenal were wearing that day:  I doubt baseball will ever come to that, but once tradition is broken by something like advertisements on bases, the trend of commercialization could become something of a runaway train. I know on the Daily Show last night Lewis Black mentioned that baseball was considering allowing sleeve advertisements on all jerseys, but I don't know if that's true or not (it is fake news after all). The sleeve isn't that far from the chest. I just want to record right now as against this (the Spiderman bases as well as jersey advertisements) in every conceivable way. UDPATE: Darren Rovell, ESPN's resident business guru, claims that he was told by an unnamed MLB official that sleeve patches (as worn by the Yankees and D-Rays in Tokyo) would net in upwards of $500 million in ad revenue. I assume the owners have seen that number, so the patches can't be too far from becoming a reality. |
