Baseballhead:
Feel the Magic...D'oh!

Michael Cox

Hello, fellow Americans... er, and British and Japanese, and what the heck, we've never had a hit from Fiji, but perhaps some of you might relay our greeting the next time you vacation.

Starting this week, we'll look back at the season that was -- in that endearing, semi-random Baseballhead manner -- and what better place to start than the beginning, eh?

Flash back to the fall of 1998. Mark "Man, I'm Huuuge" McGwire and Sammy "Funny or Humble? I Can't Decide" Sosa captivate America with their mighty feats of home run mightiness. After the season, they're everywhere, preferably together, like some sort of baseball Abbott and Costello (hint: Sammy was Lou). MTV and Leno. Mac in "Mad About You," Sammy in Caribbean tourism ads.

Then, the Yankees capped their "Season for the Ages" with an utterly dominating World Series victory over the Padres, which resulted in George Steinbrenner once again appearing on Letterman to pronounce the win "good for baseball."

Flash forward to April 1999. With the golden opportunity to market the game to all the new fans who caught on during Homer Hype '98, Major League Baseball gave us -- answering machine messages.

In what may go down in history as the worst marketing blunder of all time, MLB decided to not only keep Mac 'n' Sosa out of their ads entirely, but to not feature any real live players whatsoever. Instead, we got dorky actors listening to taped voices "thanking" them for their support.

What Bud's gang forgot was that fans don't give a rat's ass about "we loooove you fans" crap. We want excitement. We want to know what's in it for us. That's why we're attending sporting events instead of staying at home reading The Iliad or attending the local Microsoft Office user group meeting.

If MLB was a major movie studio, people would have been fired over that bungle, and their Spago reservation attempts rebuffed. Instead, it's likely that the same pack of marketing geniuses will be back with another stab. Hopefully they won't succeed in killing the victim this time.

I don't only blame the MLB brass for that mistake, mind you -- the players' union is just as culpable for not demanding that players are made an integral part of any marketing plan. Of course, with even mediocre veterans bringing $5-10M per year on the "free" market this offseason, I guess the MLBPA couldn't care less if the sport as a whole is better marketed.

In the long run, however, it's a losing game, and if Don Fehr can wield his clout to get everyone to show up for the Players Choice Awards, he can just as easily demand that a few guys suit up for the cameras.

With marketing like that, it should be no surprise that attendance and TV ratings were both down in 1999. Oh, yeah, but they were up at Busch Stadium, Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium.

An even larger blunder was made in Arizona, where Jerry Colangelo's decision to drastically increase ticket prices resulted in a 17% attendance drop, despite the fact that his ballpark is still gleaming and his team was in first place for pretty much the entire second half. Hopefully, other teams will keep this lesson in mind: the "demand" part of "supply and demand" counts just as much as the "supply" part.

Fortunately, all this didn't completely sink the Good Ship Baseball -- playoff ratings were up (we'll conveniently forget for a moment that they still haven't fully recovered from pre-strike levels). Of course, the fact that both New York teams and the Red Sox were in the Championship Series certainly helped.

The Pete Rose/Jim Gray flap alone got more people talking about the sport (and actually siding with a player) than all of MLB's crappy ads combined. I had a chuckle at the recent Martin Short skit where Rose wouldn't stop grilling Short about "Captain Bob." It was better publicity for MLB than MLB themselves could muster all year, and although I believe that Rose's ban from baseball may be justified, anyone hated that much by Selig must be at least a little all right.

Oh, and this winter Ricky Martin is doing the tourism ads.

Next week: The Year of Fan Misbehavior, or The Year of Media Amnesia?

about the author

Michael Cox would really, really like to be a millionaire, but he has an immense fear of that Regis Philbin character. Offer to share his pain or his possible prize money at mc@strikethree.com.