Baseball Cancels Plans for Movie Ad on Bases

It was a diamond within a diamond within a diamond, a 4-inch-by-4-inch swatch of red on a white base on a dirt-brown infield. Smaller than a bag of peanuts, smaller than a box of Cracker Jack, it caused the sport of baseball to sputter and actually concede a possible mistake, which is a kind of superpower Spider-Man no doubt would like to learn.

One day after Major League Baseball announced plans to load the bases with advertising for the upcoming movie “Spider-Man 2,” the bags are empty again. Angry baseball fans delivered the bases-clearing blow, with Major League Baseball and Columbia Pictures deciding Thursday to pull the ads that were to appear on bases during games from June 11-13.

“We don’t want to do anything that takes away from a fan’s enjoyment of the game,” Geoffrey Ammer, president of worldwide marketing for the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, said in a statement.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, talking with reporters in Oakland before the A’s Thursday night game with the New York Yankees, said, “It isn’t worth, frankly, having a debate about.

“I’m a traditionalist. The problem in sports marketing, particularly in baseball, is you’re always walking a very sensitive line. Nobody loves tradition and history as much as I do.”

The original plan, made public Wednesday, was to place diamond-shaped ads for the movie on top of all three bases during the first three games of interleague play, with similar ads appearing in the on-deck circles. Advertising was also to be placed on home plate and the pitching rubber before those games but would be removed before the first pitch. “Spider-Man 2” opens in theaters June 30.

The plan began to fall apart when the New York Yankees, scheduled to play host to the San Diego Padres from June 11 to 13, said they would allow the on-base ads only during batting practice and one of the three games.

Many baseball purists were outraged by the plan, worth a reported $3.6 million.

Fay Vincent, former baseball commissioner and former president of Columbia Pictures, called the agreement “sad.”

Congressman George Nethercutt (R-Wash.) wrote a letter to Selig asserting that the plan “undermines the character of America’s pastime at every level.”

The consumer watchdog group Commercial Alert urged fans to boycott the movie and all Sony products, Columbia being a Sony Pictures Entertainment company.

“It’s time for baseball fans to stand up to the greedy corporations that are insulting us and our national pastime,” Commercial Alert executive director Gary Ruskin said in a statement released by his organization Wednesday. “We urge everyone not to buy Sony products, and not to see Sony movies, especially ‘Spider-Man 2.’

“How low will baseball sink? Next year, will they replace the bats with long Coke bottles, and the bases with big hamburger buns?”

Responding to the outcry, Major League Baseball decided to remove the logo from the bases but will keep the advertising in the on-deck circles and will proceed with plans to run previews of the movie on stadium scoreboards and hand out promotional masks and foam fingers to fans at those games.

“The bases were an extremely small part of this program,” Bob DuPuy, president and chief operating officer of Major League Baseball, said in a statement. “However, we understand that a segment of our fans was uncomfortable with this particular component and we do not want to detract from the fan’s experience in any way.”

Peter Ueberroth, another former baseball commissioner, said the playing field should be off-limits from commercialization.

“I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “I think there are other ways to generate more revenue and not be on the field. I’d be against it, basically. But that’s me being a bit of a traditionalist.”

Ueberroth didn’t think on-base advertising would be effective.

“What can you see?” he said. “Do you have any angle where you can really see it?

“They have to be doing it for the eye of television, obviously, not for the fans [inside the stadium]. The fan can’t see it at the game. They can see something on there, but they can’t tell what it is. [And on TV] how often do you concentrate on what’s on top of the bag?”

Michael Jeary of the New York-based Della Femina Rothschild Jeary Advertising agency believes the controversy surrounding the on-base advertising will help the movie more than the ads themselves.

“Looking at the top of the bags, it doesn’t seem like it would be a big enough venue to register any kind of message,” he said.

“I think the PR that’s generated by you and me talking about it is going to be a lot more than it’s ever going to achieve in terms of the monetary and impact value of the advertising per se ... I didn’t even know ‘Spider-Man 2’ was coming out. Now everybody’s talking about it. I think they got their value out of it.”

Peter Roby, director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said he saw merit in the concept.

“We’ve collaborated with some folks on research on what happens to urban kids with regards to sports participation,” he said. “We’ve also seen the trend in regards to kids not playing as much baseball as they used to. If any of this stuff entices kids to want to get active, to get out on the ball field and play, then we’re all for it.

“I think it’s an attempt on baseball’s part to create some excitement and fun around the game and maybe recruit more kids to the game that might not have considered it. If it helps participation in baseball or softball, if it helps give kids more of a reason to want to be physically active ... then I’m all for that.”

Roby said there “has been a trend over the last 10 or 15 years that baseball participation has diminished. Because it’s getting eaten away by other sports either becoming more popular or the advent of other activities kids didn’t have 15 to 20 years ago, like extreme sports, the in-line sports, snowboarding, the video games and the Internet.

“So they certainly need to continue to find ways to connect with that younger consumer in particular, because I think the statistics show that the average age of the baseball fan is 34, 35, 36 years old.”

Recruiting younger fans without alienating older ones is a fine line baseball wasn’t able to straddle with this promotion.

“I think the problem here is that you’re impinging on the playing fields -- the green and brown and white geometry,” baseball writer and author Roger Kahn said. “Now you’re getting whatever color the Spider-Man ads are going to be....

“It’s the way of the world. I think the thing is here, you’re actually putting advertising on the playing field. And purists are going to get upset. I’m not much of a purist. If I can live with the DH, I can live with this.”

Ueberroth said that if he were purchasing advertising for a company, rather than placing a logo on the bases, he’d go for the uniforms.

“The sleeves of the players are a lot more important than the bases,” he said.

It has happened already, earlier this year in Tokyo, where the Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays opened their season playing with uniform sleeves and batting helmets adorned with the Ricoh logo.

“You can be sure that in time that will be common,” Kahn said. “It’s a marketing-driven society. Remembering the days when the grass was real everywhere and television didn’t dictate baseball schedules, it’s nostalgia to look back at those days. It won’t come again.”

Roby concurred.

“The days of the purity of the sport staying separate from the marketing, those days are gone,” he said.

“I think people that are purists need to get over it and start thinking about steroid use and that kind of stuff. That’s the stuff that’s going to challenge the integrity of the game, not the marketing.”