Coming soon to an MLB team near you: Ads on uniforms

Amid all the lack of progress concerning a new Basic Agreement, one virtually certain outgrowth involves the placement of ads on MLB uniforms.

This may offend traditionalists … and perhaps non-traditionalists as well, but the groundwork has already been laid. At this stage of the stalled talks, the only reason the subject hasn’t gotten more conversation is that significantly more troubling topics have dominated.

There are several obvious reasons why ads on uniforms are virtually a foregone conclusion to appear when games begin this season … assuming, of course, those games do begin.

The first and most obvious is that ads on uniforms translates to free money. The only question yet to be decided on that score is how to split up this additional pie.

It seems unlikely, however, that either the owners or players would veto that literal free money because they can’t agree how to split it up.

The second reason why ads on uniforms are likely inevitable is that they’re already being used. Not on player uniforms, of course, but on umpires. The arbiters last July began wearing ads for FTX, a cryptocurrency firm.

Terms of that deal and the owner-umpire split have not been disclosed, although published reports have indicated it will last for five years.

There’s still a third reason why ads on uniforms are inevitable: MLB has already experimented with the idea. During some recent games played in foreign locations – London, Tokyo, and Monterrey to name three – the participating teams wore commercial patches on their helmets or sleeves.

Of course, the concept of ads on uniforms is only new to baseball; other sports have been doing so for years. Most major professional soccer teams, including almost all the major U.S.-based ones, have gone as far as to replace the city identifications or team names on the front of their jerseys with the names of major product sponsors, turning the players into running billboards.

Numerous NBA teams already wear small ads above the larger team names.

There’s no suggestion – not yet, anyway – that the TD Ameritrade logo is soon to replace the traditional C on the front of Cubbie blue, or that the stylized M of the Milwaukee Brewers will be supplanted by a bottle of Miller on that team’s caps.

Or should I not be giving owners and players any ideas? If umpires can shill for an alt-money company, isn’t anything possible?