King Kaufman's Sports Daily

MySpace nukes Cubbies Baseball's page at MLB's request. Fans are used to the treatment, but not the villain: MySpace.

Read more: Sports, Baseball, Chicago Cubs, Major League Baseball, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, MLB, myspace

Aug. 24, 2007 | There it goes again?

Cubbies Baseball, which describes itself as a "sportal" -- a sports portal -- for Cubs fans, had its MySpace page shut down at the request of Major League Baseball last week. More than 3,000 "friends" of the site went down the drain with the MySpace page, according to Cubbies Baseball proprietor Bryan McGraw in a blog post.

"We received no notification from MLB or MySpace," McGraw writes in an e-mail. "One minute we are working on the MySpace page exchanging comments with friends, and the next minute, our I.D. is no longer valid."

Is this yet another case of MLB stomping on the organic love of its fans for its product, as it has a habit of doing?

"All we can do is assume that Major League Baseball hates its fans and is dead set against appealing to anyone under the age of 50," writes Pat Lackey on the AOL Fanhouse blog. "But we knew that already."

But not so fast. Cubbies Baseball, which has an affiliate partnership deal with MLB Shop that allows it to sell official merchandise by pointing to the MLB.com store, wasn't affected. The site, which McGraw says he runs as a hobby, offers team news and message boards as well as merchandise and tickets.

The bigger problem here is MySpace, which summarily dumped the Cubbies Baseball page rather than asking McGraw to remove the offending logos and trademarks, which would have been easy for it to do and easy for him to do.

"We have an affiliate program that grants him a license to display and point to our shop using the [team] marks in that manner," says MLB.com spokesman Matt Gould. "In this specific case, that was granted only for his Web site."

In other words, the MySpace site was a third party, outside the agreement between Cubbies Baseball and MLB Advanced Media, which runs MLB.com, including the MLB Shop. There are many fan sites for the Cubs and other teams on MySpace. Gould says McGraw ran into trouble with baseball by trying to use his MySpace page as an extension of his business.

McGraw doesn't see it that way.

"If you ask me," he writes, "the MySpace baseball fan pages show support for the MLB product. It doesn't make sense to me that MLB would discourage people from showing support for their favorite baseball teams."

Next page: Can't anybody send a polite cease-and-desist request?