At Jacobs Field we watched two American League pennant teams, witnessed the longest home run in franchise history, saw Sandy Alomar Jr. make the city proud in the MLB All-Star game and we felt a special connection to the home run porch.
And so it is that this, too, has passed.
In case you haven’t heard, insurance company Progressive has bought the naming rights to what is Cleveland’s most iconic ballpark. Say bye to The Jake, say hello to… um… The Prog.?
The outcry from the team’s fans has been passionate – though not quite as loud as I would have expected, perhaps owing the fact that this was done well into the offseason before casual baseball fans have Chief Wahoo on their mind – and I immediately joined my Internet nerd brothers in arms, posting cruel comments on the company’s ‘Contact Us’ page. But why was I so upset? After a weekend to think about this, I’ve broken it down into two perspectives: The fan mentality and the business imperative.
Let’s start with the fan mentality. Noted soccer fan and former S*KM contributor Jack from D.C. has long questioned the American practice of keeping team jerseys free of advertising in the major sports. It’s a great source of revenue, he says, and it’s commonplace overseas and even here in some niche sports.
From a distance, this point is legitimate and logical. In fact, one could argue that if we all hate having two television timeouts between a third down stop and the first offensive play after a punt return then we should embrace all types of sponsorship. After all, if a company could get its name on a football helmet, it would probably prefer if the NFL didn’t break for a commercial featuring another company.
Of course, we know that’s not what would happen. The basics of sports marketing tell us that there is literally no line where teams will stop gauging the paying fan. And so tradition has been our last line of defense. Stadiums were named after owners and cities and jerseys stayed clean.
Naturally, the first thing to go was stadium names. This was an easier thing to tackle than jerseys because it required only one money-hungry owner to fold at a time. It would be near impossible to get 30 baseball owners to agree to have an ex-lax sign on the front of their jerseys, but you could easily get one owner to name his/her stadium ex-lax Field.
In some places, the loss of a stadium name wasn’t that important. The sponsorship was part of a new stadium for many cities, so it seemed like the natural evolution of sports to have branding for the stadium.
In other cities, such as Cleveland, this practice draws immediate criticism. After all, the thing that we are truly frustrated about here, I think, is that there is no sense of loyalty to happy tradition and memory. The Cleveland Indians are our team and they play in Jacobs Field. They have players like Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle, Omar Vizquel and Charles Nagy. They are managed by Mike Hargrove. They have a Chief Wahoo on their hats.
Wait. No, no they don’t. The only thing that’s true from that snapshot of 1995 and now is that they are called the Cleveland Indians. Other than that it would appear everything and everyone in sports is for sale.
This is the true outrage that we are feeling because we still have the sentimental magnetism of The Jake. To sell that to some insurance company is the same as selling our scrapbook full of ticket stubs and ‘Sock it to ‘em’ towels for $1.85.
The sad fact is there is nothing sacred in sports. I hate to be a curmudgeon, but I’m waiting for the day the Key Bank Indigenous Persons of Cleveland take on the Fifth Third/Clorox Bleached White Sox of Chicago at The Progressive Field Stadium sponsored by Ambiance.
Now onto Progressive, the insurance giant that will fork over $3.6 million a season during the next 16 years for the naming rights. In general, I’ve no complaints with Progressive as I do not have insurance through the company and, though it made my Green with Irony Watch a few months back, it generally avoids a black eye in public.
Until now.
I know this is supposed to be a sports column, so we won’t delve into the business end of Progressive too deeply. Still, the basics are telling enough: The company saw profits drop 26 percent in the last fiscal year and eliminated 340-plus jobs – many of them from its large Cleveland work force.
With those sort of internal problems, how can a company justify spending $3.6 million a year on advertising on a ballpark? Think about this: Even if the 340 people that were let go were making $100,000 – a large sum of money in any market but particularly large in a middle-market like Cleveland – with $3.6 million Progressive could have kept 36 of those employees. That’s more than 10 percent.
If MoneyMike Inc. ever takes off, and then slumps to the point that I find myself in a similar position, I will keep the 36 employees. Beyond basic loyalty, which is currently lacking in American industry, I would take the opportunity to call those 36 people into a room and tell them that things were bad. Then I would tell them they could have been cut, but were spared in hopes they could help turn things around. ‘Please,’ I would ask them, ‘tell people what we are trying to do here. I could have spent money on marketing, but I’m spending it on you, make that a worthwhile effort.’
Breaking NFL playoff news: Did you hear that Seattle kicker Josh Brown wore heated warm-up pants in the Seahawks’ loss to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday? This was a story that was underserved by the major television networks. Did ESPN even mention this fact?
More playoffs: Though it won’t be a family award, I do believe that an award should be made for the Seattle Seahawks. It could perhaps be called the NFL Cock Tease Award. Is it just me, or has Mike Holmgren’s stay in Seattle been one long dry hump? Every year the team is good enough to compete at a high level before bowing out. And, yes, we all agree they should have beaten the Steelers in the Super Bowl, but do you really believe either of those two teams belonged on the game’s biggest stage that year?
Last playoff note: Indianapolis could beat New England, though the odds are slim. The Chargers cannot beat New England. They can, however, beat Indianapolis. This is the AFC version of rock, paper, scissors.
A brief note on the new ‘American Gladiators’: Why do athletes and television-based competitive contenders insist on promising they will give more than 100 percent in a competition? As I’ve mentioned before, this is physically impossible; you cannot give more than all you can give. That’s all you can give! So, you can offer to give your all, which is 100 percent, and that’s it. Please don’t offer to give 110 percent. And if your opponent is foolish enough to believe he or she will give 110 percent, don’t up the stupid ante by offering 120 percent, as if that’s more effort – you cannot give 20 percent more than all you can give!
Other television annoyances: As you may or may not know, MoneyMike is able to keep such a fresh perspective on the world through an effort to study pop culture. How is this best achieved? By watching Vh-1’s Top 20 countdown every week.
OK, to be fair this show is awful and outdated. However, MTV is completely unwatchable at this point and I like to see what terrible videos somehow become popular in America.
But that’s not the point. What I want to talk about with video countdowns is abbreviated videos. As I would text message to my cool friends — if we couldn’t hook up on MySpace or get together for a meal at McDonalds before Salsa Night at a local bar — WTF? Why is it OK for a video countdown to show abbreviated videos? Isn’t the video the point of the show? Vh-1, for example, cuts its videos short for more time with its manish-looking host (I have not and will not learn her name). Why is this a good practice?
I tried to think of how this practice would work in other forms of entertainment and it just wouldn’t. A band certainly could not cut its set short for more time with the sound guy who introduced them. And could you imagine the outrage expressed by NFL fans if the only thing shown was the middle portion of plays – right at the second of the snap and then cut right before the tackle – so we could all spend more time watching Joe Buck?
The English language and television: I often bow to language mistakes and malapropisms on television because it is a medium built for colloquialism, but the TBS show ‘10 Items or Less’ is pushing my language buttons.
The show, preparing to enter a second short season, is some sort of comedy about an unsuccessful businessman who returns home to run a grocery store after his father’s death. Or something to that effect, according to a well-qualified TV-watching source in MoneyMike’s diverse friend pool.
The plot is not the problem. The problem is the show should be called ‘10 items or fewer.’ The long-lauded AP style book has this to say about the difference between fewer and less: ‘In general, use fewer for individual items, less for bulk or quantity.’
If you didn’t follow that definition, here’s what it means: You have fewer of a countable noun, and less of a quantity or uncountable noun. For example: I make less money at S*Km than I do at my real job, but the important thing is I have 10,000 fewer readers for every piece I write.
Of course, the reason the show irks me so much is that the title is taken from a sign hanging at the register of nearly every grocer in the country. MoneyMike has long been anal enough to take this complaint straight to grocer management, and must not be the only one: Somewhat-famed proper communications advocacy group Plain English reported last spring that UK grocer Tesco was changing its signs from ‘less’ to ‘fewer’ to appease the grammar gods. Though the company Web site provided no news release on the timetable of switching all the signs in Tesco’s nearly 2,000 UK stores, I do hope the results of such careful administration show up in the grocer’s bottom line.
MoneyMike’s Green with Irony Watch (running item): Good news to those who have the disposable income to spend more than $185 on shoes: The Nike Air Jordan XX3 is about to be released. It will be first released to only 23 retailers in late January at $230 per specialized pair before dropping to $185 for the ‘common folk.’ Even better, you don’t have to feel bad about how much money you’ve wasted on sneakers because it’s the company’s first ‘green’ shoe. Ah, how the feeling of eco-friendly behavior will undo the stress of unintelligent spending.
The new Jordan, rumored to be the last in the long shoe line, is less harmful as a product because of a system of interlocking panels holding the shoes together instead of glues and other adhesives that are not friendly to baby polar bears and other cute animals worth saving.
And, sure, you have to start somewhere, but the footprint left by this will not be Jordan-sized. Though Nike exec. Tinker Hatfield (that’s his real name, which MoneyMike thinks is kind of badass), told ‘Brandweek’ that other companies would soon be following Nike’s lead, this path is sort of misplaced.
First and foremost, all major retailers need to rethink their packaging. Here’s a story from MoneyMike’s real job as a successful business journalist: I recently attended a luncheon with and then interviewed Sam’s Club President and CEO C. Douglas McMillon. While Sam’s Club and its parent company, Wal-Mart, are much-maligned, McMillon and other leaders have realized that packaging is where the retail juggernaut does the most damage. McMillon noted that nearly 30 percent of all waste in landfills is just packaging and that Sam’s Club will reduce packaging by five percent before 2013. Though I would implore a company to make a bigger change than that, the sheer size of the Wal-Mart/Sam’s Club Empire will make this improvement create significant impact on the amount of packaging waste in the U.S. and abroad.
By comparison, Nike’s efforts to use less glue on a product that is just a small portion of its line will do almost nothing. Take into account that the Jordan brand is just one line of a sub-division for the company. Imagine what Nike, which posted $16.3 billion in revenue in 2007, could do if it emphasized the green movement across all of its products. Again, kudos to Nike for trying to get a very expensive shoe in the door of the green movement, but grow up and get a real agenda, don’t just use the movement to help sell a shoe that has already saturated the market.
Witty sports banter of the week (oft forgotten item): Talking about the offensive struggles for Larry Hughes’ alma mater St. Louis– it scored just 20 points, a new division one record for fewest points in a game, during loss to George Washington last week – a work conversation turned to noting the team had a Larry Hughes night offensively. The best quote came from my co-worker Erik, known to many in the blog world as Papa Cass. This is from an e-mail:
‘Did the first 5,000 fans in attendance get a coupon for a free bone bruise?’
Next week: Frankly, I just don’t know yet. Maybe we’ll do a Super Bowl preview.
-MoneyMike is S*KM’s highest paid per-word writer. That’s why this week’s Green with Irony Watch featured more words than Double C knows.
Even as a casual fan of sports, The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim is shameful. That is all.