King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Baseball keeps a promise and still screws the fans with its dumb Spider-Man deal. Plus: The Lakers are weird, and they're dying.

May 6, 2004 | Major League Baseball is acting like that school bully who promises he'll stop hitting you and won't even touch you again, then smacks you upside the head with a rock and says, "I didn't touch you."

Having assured fans last month that it had no plans to sell advertising on uniforms, baseball announced Wednesday that it had sold ads on the bases, the on-deck circles, home plate and the pitching rubbers of 15 stadiums hosting interleague games the weekend of June 11-13.

But not on uniforms!

The ads are for "Spider-Man 2," and they'll be removed from the plate and the rubber before the first pitch. The Yankees say they'll remove them from the bases too before the game starts.

Look, we've been over this ground before and I'm not going to preach to the choir about how the encroachment of advertising into areas considered hallowed by the game's best fans is bad for the game in the long run. I got way more e-mails Wednesday about the "Spider-Man 2" promotion than I've ever gotten in regard to something I hadn't devoted a column to. All of them expressed outrage.

So let's just talk about how dumb this particular promotion is.

First of all, it's a new revenue source, yes. "Found money," as a Blue Jays executive put it. But Sony Pictures insisted it wouldn't pay as much for the promotion in smaller cities as it would in big markets. So while it does bring in some extra dough, it does so in a way that only exacerbates what Major League Baseball has been telling us for years is its biggest problem: revenue disparity between large and small markets.

Is baseball really too weak to stand up to Sony Pictures and say, "If you want New York, you've got to take Kansas City too"? Is it too spineless to walk away from a deal that's reported to be worth a lousy $3.6 million?

Three point six million! For all of baseball! That's setup-man money, Mike Remlinger money -- for one team. That's what baseball's getting to piss off its best customers and sully one of the greatest human-made vistas ever created with crass, disposable imagery. Adjusted for inflation, that makes the mess of pottage Esau got for his birthright look like free dinner for life at Chez Panisse.

This had to be done, you see, because "We need to reach out to a younger demographic to bring them to the ballpark," said Jacqueline Parkes, baseball's senior vice president for marketing and advertising.

Next page: Baseball's bait-and-switch on kids. Plus: Those strange, sinking Lakers