MLB Week 1

April 11, 2010

The first week of the new MLB season has come and gone. If you missed it, it was probably for one of the following reasons:

1. You were busy watching Duke crush little David, or 14 NBA teams shift and settle into their respective playoff positions (only to be bricks on the path to a Cavaliers-Lakers final), or Tiger Woods-palooza at the Masters, or the final week of foreplay before Lord Stanley’s Cup
2. You figured you would have about 150+ more chances to see your team play this season
3. You’re waiting for Stephen Strasburg to cure the sick and lead the people of D.C. to a promised holy-land of baseball greatness (not to mention throw a fastball into outer-space)
4. Or…you just weren’t able to see the parts of the first week that you wanted to

Me, I fall into that fourth category (and the part of the first that was about hockey).

Outside of the fact that the Dodgers almost got swept by the Pirates and their $27.50 payroll, I hear that the first week was a pretty good one. Yankees-Red Sox, Cardinals are really good, Phillies are really good, and there is the whole Jason Heyward thing in Atlanta…but again, these are only things that I hear.

For those that don’t know, Jayson Heyward is more or less the next coming of Babe Ruth, but infinitely cooler. In baseball circles people throw out names like Hank Aaron, Frank Thomas, and Ken Griffey Junior. Rarified air.

So, with all of these expectations, and against the backdrop of a standing ovation before he had actually done anything in a major league uniform, Heyward…well…did a whole lot of something. In his first at bat, and with two teammates out on the bags, Heyward cranked a 414-foot gem over the fences. From what I’m told, it was something pretty cool. The fans went crazy, Heyward’s already great expectations became God-like, and he went 3-3 for the game.

I went to Youtube to try to watch it, but only got this instead: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by MLB Advanced Media”. To its credit, society at large tried its best to fill the void by posting a series of camera-phone-recorded versions of the event, and even one surprisingly entertaining virtual recreation (see here). Additionally, I probably could have found the video on MLB.com, or something authorized affiliate’s website; but I just didn’t have that much sustained interest or time at work.

I still haven’t seen the video- but again, I hear that it was really a neat scene.

To be honest, the fact that I couldn’t search “Heyward Home Run” on Youtube and find twenty recordings of the live gamecast blows my mind. Why wouldn’t major league baseball want me to watch that? On their website or somebody else’s website, why wouldn’t they want me to watch it as many times as possible? Sure, I understand copyright law, and I don’t have any misconception in terms of whether or not they are entitled to block their media from being shown through non-authorized outlets. They have every right. The problem is just that they were stupid to enforce it this particular time, because their interests (both short and long term) are much better served by allowing the internet to do what it does best: create buzz.

The people that are going to go to MLB.com to find Heyward’s home run are the ones that already watch baseball. Half of them probably own some sort of league-pass and have the game recorded on their TIVO. In order to grow the sport, you need to appeal to the person that doesn’t currently care enough to go searching for something like that. In order to do that, you need to make your product available to all sorts of different demographics, and in all sorts of mediums (internet, television, newspaper, etc.). Any exposure is good exposure. That’s marketing 101.

The idea that restricting internet content is profitable in the long term exists in the past. It exists before things like Napster and Youtube proved that whole mentality completely and utterly hopeless. The internet is entirely too big and too quickly evolving to contain with a copyright suit, or with a never-ending string of copyright suits for that matter. Bud Selig and the MLB brain trust can either spend millions on lawyers in some futile effort to control the masses, or it can just loosen the chain and reap the kind of PR-benefit that comes with two million-plus views of the Heyward video.

People in positions of power hold the end of the chain more often than not, but they are prone to complete misunderstandings of when to swing the ball at the either end. They swing it to their benefit and to their detriment with the same enjoyment. Baseball has become a sport of old guys recalling games they saw in some distant childhood and players from a card collection that their mother threw out when they left for college thirty or forty years ago.

The league has an entire generation of new talent on the field that they want to translate into a new generation of fans off of it; but they are doing everything in their power to stop us from watching it.