Baseball is awesome, we’re agreed on this. However, MLB: you need to stop being a giant douchebag of a corporation. The latest example is a Little League in Tinley Park, Illinois that was recently sent a cease-and-desist letter threatening a lawsuit if the league didn’t remove all MLB team names from the uniforms of the kids. It seems that for MLB, the fact that these freeloading little kids wanted to have their team names be things like the Phillies or the Cubs is absolutely ridiculous. They should be paying MLB thousands of dollars instead, obviously!
For Dave Glenn, the man responsible for making the Tinley Park uniforms, this whole situation is ludicrous. “Does a league have a right to name a local team? Baseball is saying no. That’s flying in the face of 100 years of tradition. I go out of my way to make sure we use town names, so we make it clear this isn’t a major league jersey. Now we’re told we can’t even do that. What it boils down to is the interpretation of the trademark.”
In 1992 MLB as an enterprise made approximately $1.2 billion in profits, last year they made over $6 billion, so I can certainly understand the absolutely inherent need for such lucrative moneymaking machines like Little League to start paying thousands and thousands of dollars for licensing fees. I mean, Bud Selig did only make $14.5 million last year and he probably is in the midst of a making a certain part of his body something respectable, and that kind of work simply doesn’t come cheap.
“Soon it will be THIS big!”
TThere is simply no way that Bud can be kept in all his various pills and prescriptions unless these dastardly thieving little piss-ants are crushed. After all, who needs little kids to like baseball? I mean why would MLB want to attract little kids to become life-long fans of the game? That seems like a poor waste of resources. It seems like MLB is going out of their way to push kids away from the game and towards the NFL. All the playoff games go super late now, often not ending before midnight, during the week, which means that most kids can’t stay up and see them, thus taking the games that are on the biggest stage and making them completely inaccessible to the youngest subset of fans.
But who needs little kids? After all, MLB has record attendance figures, people aren’t staying away from the game, so to MLB the chance to screw some small-town folk is just a fine way to spend an afternoon. For the kids of Tinley Park though, now they can’t go up to bat pretending to be Derrek Lee or Carlos Quentin. They can’t stare down from the mound channeling their inner Cole Hamels or Jamie Moyer (god I hope little kids pretend to be Jamie Moyer). When they make a great diving stop they can’t imagine that for a moment they know what it feels like to be Asdrubal Cabrera.
A solution may have been found, according to Steve Bowles, the league president, “We can’t have a (Major League) team name or logo on the uniform unless we buy it from Majestic. When we did a cost comparison of what we had versus that, we can’t do it for the same price. We were going to look at college names, because the licensing [cost] is different. We looked at names like the Fighting Irish and the Trojans, etc. About a third of the parents really didn’t mind the college names.”
Continue reading ‘MLB Wants Your Lunch Money Too’
The Slanch Report 
Recent Comments