Baseball Fans, Man Your Battle Stations

Major League Baseball intended to “decorate” -- its word -- first, second and third bases in 15 ballparks on a weekend in June. The decoration was to be a small logo provided by spider people paying to advance the cause of spidery people everywhere. A baseball executive said the logo would be unobtrusive. In fact, he said, it could be seen only by people in the upper decks.

To that last statement, the only possible response is: Huh?

A 6-inch square logo could be seen from hundreds of feet away in the nosebleed seats?

Seen by whom? Superman with binoculars?

Well, the executive allowed, the logo also could be seen in “the overhead shot.” Meaning, of course, on television.

For the first time, baseball had sold advertising literally on the field of play. It had sold a tiny square of its soul for no more money than might keep a utility infielder in sunflower seeds for a season.

Yes, the logo was only a small piece of a promotional package that, it says here, is a wonderful addition to the game’s entertainment value.

The scary part was that MLB accepted the on-field logo idea without argument. According to MLB president and chief operating officer Bob DuPuy, the spidery people had not demanded such placement; they just asked.

“Frankly,” DuPuy said, “we didn’t say, ‘No.’ ” Nor did they say “no” while arranging that blasphemous season-opening series in Tokyo. An office equipment company paid maybe $10 million to “sponsor” the Yankees-Devil Rays games. Players wore uniform patches and helmet decals. At the rate of $10 million for three games, sponsorship of 162 games comes to $540 million. And that’s for only two teams, not 30.

So MLB finds it easy to go along. As it was easy to say yes to the Japanese money, it must have been easier to take the spidery people’s money. After all, the deal was for only a reported $3.6 million. But what happens when the teeny-tiny logos aren’t enough for enormous corporations willing to pay, say, $500 million? Will MLB agree without argument when that corporation demands the outfield grass in every ballpark be painted from foul line to foul line with, say, your favorite sexual dysfunction remedy?

Baseball’s history is rich with advertising signs in ballparks. In the 1930s of its glorious youth, the Dodgers’ Ebbets Field was a baseball palace. Part of its beauty was a scoreboard in right center field that carried a sign selling Schaefer beer. Schaefer’s “h” lit up to indicate a base hit, an “e” for an error. On the outfield wall below the scoreboard, in a space three feet high and 30 feet long, the Pitkin Avenue clothier Abe Stark promised, “Hit Here, Win a Suit.”

Whether it was a slanted pack of Chesterfields puffing smoke circles from the Polo Grounds walls or the Anheuser-Busch eagle flapping its wings at Sportsman’s Park, corporate advertising long has been a dominant feature in baseball stadiums. The inevitable extension of that commerce brings us to the 21st century’s fact that ballparks are more often named for corporations than for cities or franchises.

But now, it turns out, enough is more than enough.

Decorate the outfield walls all you want.

Stay off the actual field of play.

Leave the bases alone.

Such was the indignation over MLB’s marriage with the spider people that my friend Tom said, “Would you kindly write a column about these things that seem to be jokes, and probably should be jokes? They’re giving teams $50,000 to put spiders on the bases? How much would they give them if they all wore spider suits at bat?”

From my friend Verenda: “I officially am no longer a baseball fan. The ads are bad enough. To pretend they are doing it to attract a younger crowd is laughable and insulting. A young fan will be more likely to go to the park, feel more comfortable, more eager to return, because there is an age-related advertisement on the field? Bull-you-know-what.”

David Letterman, in his famously bitter/TV comic/ironic way, called Commissioner Bud Selig “this nitwit” and suggested that baseball’s next deal might produce another logo on the bases. Letterman then held up a base decorated with a logo shilling for The Official Steroids Of Major League Baseball.

Faced with immediate and rising indignation from fans protecting the integrity of the game on the field, both the spider people and baseball quickly abandoned the idea of ads on the bases. (Michael Jeary of the New York advertising firm Della Femina Rothschild Jeary and Partners said with a wry laugh, “Maybe it was planned that way. Boy, didn’t they get a lot of attention for that one day? The cynic in me says somebody’s very happy and probably is getting a bonus.”)

And now that fans have squashed the spidery people, there is, of course, other work that ought to be done. More vermin are on the loose. There is the designated hitter. There are World Series games that end tomorrow.

There’s the steroid of choice. Not to mention the Cracker Jack, Coca-Cola and foot-long hot dog for which a child must borrow against his college fund.

Get to it, baseball lovers.