Don Deal: The San Francisco Giants are pleased to welcome a top player worth $290,000
Selling advertisements on almost everything is one of the perks of owning a successful sports team. Of course, stadiums have been doing this for a while. Who can forget when, at the end of 2021, the Staples Center changed to become the more foreboding Crypto.com Arena?
Additionally, uniform patches have been around for a while, demonstrating that nothing is immune to turning into a moving billboard. Long-time soccer fans have noticed it, and more recently, the NHL and NBA have too.
In Major League Baseball, sponsored patches are a relatively recent development. Teams approved them at the start of the current season along with other changes including the pitch clock, larger bases, and the shift prohibition. Seven out of the thirty teams in the league sold sponsorships at the start of the 2023 season.
The San Francisco Giants announced today that they would be adding a large Cruise patch. Given how commonplace autonomous cars have become on the mountain range that is San Francisco’s roadways, perhaps Cruise is an appropriate sponsor.
It’s a really decent-looking patch, I have to admit, even though I’m a baseball fan who still detests these kinds of deals with a burning fury. For an enormous advertisement that takes up the majority of a player’s upper arm, you know. It’s certainly not as offensive as the large red and white patch that adorned Mets uniforms towards the end of the season. I would argue that’s the reason the team has struggled, but let’s face it, this is all about the Mets (sorry, Mets fans; I’m an A’s supporter for life; don’t talk to me about pain).
Starting today and continuing through 2025, the Giants outfits will be patched. By then, self-driving automobiles with robo umps should be showing up at Oracle Park.
