King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Major League Baseball backs off of its plan to put ads on the bases, the latest P.R. fiasco for a company that makes New Coke look like a stroke of genius.
May 7, 2004 | It took about 24 hours for baseball to back away from its dumb "Spider-Man 2" promotion, which would have put logos for the flick on bases during interleague play one weekend in mid-June.
Is there anything that can make heads roll at Major League Baseball?
Try as I might I can't think of another big, high-profile business that creates public relations nightmares more often than baseball. Can you remember the last time you went nine months without hearing the words "firestorm of controversy" in relation to something Bud Selig and his people had done or said?
The great cautionary tale of the public-relations business is the New Coke fiasco of 1985. Major League Baseball does New Coke about twice a year.
Just off the top of my head: A years-long campaign to get a salary cap by trying to convince people that the product is terrible. A canceled postseason. The All-Star Game fiasco. The near-strike of '02. Advertising on uniforms. Contraction. The/Les/Los Montreal/San Juan/Where Nextpos. And now Spidey on the bases. I've just hit the highlights, and I've skipped items that we could charitably call beyond MLB's control, like the steroids issue.
Major League Baseball in the Selig Decade has been tone-deaf to the feelings of its public to a degree that's just hard to fathom. Again and again, baseball missteps, and Selig is surprised at the force of the negative reaction from the public and the press, a reaction that could have been gauged by walking outside his office in Milwaukee and buttonholing a couple of fans. Well, it's hard to find baseball fans in Milwaukee after three decades of Selig's inept ownership of the Brewers, but he has an office in New York too.
At a press conference before the Yankees-A's game in Oakland Thursday night, Selig said, "We'll take the [Spider-Man logo] off the bases. If it bothered some people, frankly it isn't worth a great debate about it."
There he goes again! Can Bud Selig get nothing right? He pulls back from an idea that had fans in an uproar, and instead of just apologizing, admitting that baseball had screwed up and was now reversing course after realizing how insulted people who care about the game felt, he demeans their feelings. Hey, he's saying, if you're going to get your panties all in a bunch, then whatever. Calm down.
He just cannot stop insulting his customers.