Gould says that MLBAM is charged with protecting the trademarks of the 30 clubs, and therefore has an ongoing effort to police sites like MySpace in search of businesses trying to make a buck by using those trademarks.
"We're really talking about the non-fan and, the word I use, impostor sites," he says, "sites that are claiming to be the official site of a club. We're not trying to infringe on the rights of fans. We're not out there to butt heads, we're not on a witch hunt. We're not looking to take things away from fans and not give them the opportunity to show their love for their team."
McGraw, a Michigan native who says he works in information systems for a Fortune 500 company in the Chicago area, also runs similar sites devoted to the Detroit Pistons and the Green Bay Packers, his other favorite teams.
Both of those sites have corresponding MySpace pages, but neither has nearly the 3,000 friends the Cubbies Baseball page had. As of Thursday afternoon, McGraw's Packers MySpace page had 451 friends, the Pistons page had 66.
The NFL and NBA may come calling, and if McGraw's wise, he'll get those friends' contact info, because he can't expect a warning from MySpace.
MySpace didn't return calls for comment, from either McGraw or this column. It really ought to look into the concept of the cease and desist request. MySpace is huge at the moment, but it's huge in an industry in which this year's huge is next year's fire sale.
McGraw writes in his blog post that he doesn't plan to fight MLB because it's a partner, but: "As for MySpace, you cam imagine how I feel about them right now."
High-handed treatment of the customers is not a good business model.
That's a lesson baseball can learn too, even though, unlike in MySpace's business, it's not likely to be challenged tomorrow by a competitor that pops up out of nowhere. I don't think MLB is the villain in this little drama, but there's a reason a writer for AOL Fanhouse -- which is a smart site -- would conclude baseball "hates its fans and is dead set against appealing to anyone under the age of 50." It fits a pattern.
Baseball also could have dropped McGraw a note politely asking him to remove its trademarks rather than letting MySpace go straight to the nuclear option.
McGraw and his 3,000 friends are experiencing something they should be familiar with as sport fans: no respect. It's just that this time they're getting it from MySpace.
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. Visit his column archive. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his MySpace page.
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