In 2019, Nike paid Major League Baseball $1 billion to put the globally recognizable “Nike swoosh” on the upper right hand corner of every MLB uniform. MLB followed the global trend of sports leagues pasting advertisements everywhere and started a movement within the league, one where ads are everywhere and take away from the beautiful game that is America’s pastime.
I don’t have a problem with a little “Nike swoosh” because that is what we have come to expect out of leagues, and it is fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. The company branding doesn’t break tradition either.
In the past, it has been common for the company producing the uniform to put its logo on the jersey. Before Nike was producing MLB uniforms, it was “Majestic Athletic.” It, too, had its logo on the uniform, but just on the sleeve, which didn’t create too much of a distraction.
My issue is with the enormous ads on uniforms for companies that have nothing to do with the team other than paying them large sums of money to display their logo. The decision to allow ads came as part of the 2022 labor contract between the MLB and the MLBPA. Since then, MLB teams have placed “patch ads” on the jersey sleeves.
For example, if you are an Astros fan, you may have seen the blue-and-white circle with the gas company known as “Oxy” in red lettering. The Oxy ad fairly matches the team colors, but it becomes more annoying when the colors do not match the team’s uniform.
Look at the Kansas City Royals. They partnered with “QuikTrip” that has a big red block logo. Not only is the size distracting, but the red doesn’t match the Royals’ uniform colors, which are blue and white/gray.
The most recent instance of these intrusive ads came when Strauss, a German “workwear” company, partnered with MLB to display their 5-by-0.92-inch logo on the side of every batting helmet throughout the postseason until 2027. These ads are super distracting because they take up the entire side of the helmet. It also relates to my point about the ads not matching team colors. When the New York Mets, whose colors are blue and orange, slap the red-and-white “Strauss” ad on their helmet, it looks bad and stands out negatively.
Some argue that the point of ads is to “stick out.” The more that people see a company’s logo, the more the company gets its money’s worth of advertising but I think that is a bad point.
Ads should be recognizable but if it’s standing out by making another product worse, people invested in the product being intruded on will develop a dislike for the advertising company because it ruined something they loved.
In the words of Frank Paul Santangelo Jr, son of F.P Santangelo, a former big leaguer, “I’m boycotting the Strauss company out of principle,” he said. “I don’t even know what that company is or what they do, but I’m never purchasing anything because they ruined helmets in the playoffs.”
Who knows where these ads could spread? There is plenty more blank space on a jersey where ads could be displayed and continue to ruin jerseys. I think I speak for everyone when I say that nobody wants these uniforms to end up like the NASCAR cars that have ads on every blank space on their car. If greedy MLB continues to use this way of making money, we suffer as fans of the game. MLB doesn’t care about us, and because of that these ads could spread even more and further erode the charm of baseball.
