You see that picture? That’s what the home jerseys will look like next year. Take it in with your eyes, process it with your brain, and get the fuck over it. The New York Yankees and Major League Baseball are a business. Businesses have the goal of making money. Outside sponsors will pay money to businesses for sponsorship. Businesses will display a sponsor’s logos for that money. That is how goals are achieved.
Now that we’ve completed Business 101, let’s talk about why some people are upset. The Yankees have never had any kind of logo on their jerseys and this is simply the gateway to turning baseball players into race cars, with the next step being every team having a sponsor like the NBA.
I’m not going to lie, that may happen. The stadium is covered in ads and the old stadium was practically an Adidas store. As long as attendance stays up, and TV deals are in the billions, these teams and leagues are going to look to put an ad on any open service.
That leaves you with five options:
- Stop Supporting Them: Just stop watching Yankee games and definitely don’t go to the couple of games you go to a year, where you look for the cheapest ticket you can get on the secondary market and bring in an unopened bottle of water. Hit them in the wallet and they’ll notice that $200 dollars a year. Then they’ll be sorry.
- Win Multiple Powerballs: Earlier this year Powerball hist $1.5 billion. After taxes, if you win alone, that leaves you with about $750 million. That’s about what the Yankees local revenue was last year, so even if Hal was selling a part of the team, that only gets you a parking spot. With the Yankees valued at $4.6 billion, and the Steinbrenners not looking to sell the team, you likely need $5 billion, so you have to win multiple times.
- Earn Enough Money To Buy The Yankees: You could make the next Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc., but if you’re still reading my stupid ramblings, you aren’t smart enough to do that.
- Time Machine: Make or build a time machine, go back in time and inspire an ancestor to have $9 million in 1973. George Steinbrenner only paid $8.3 million for the team and if your dad or grandfather just outbid him, you could be the one selling out the Nike right now. And you would be selling out just like every other owner because your one vote wouldn’t mean anything.
- STFU: Just shut up about it. Don’t worry about a Nike swoosh on the field and worry about the players on the field. It doesn’t matter to me if the Yankees want to send the players out on the field in lingerie, as long as they win the World Series.
We could just not buy these jerseys, as fans, but enough people buy those stupid jerseys with names, that we know that won’t happen. Just get over the fact that the laundry we cheer for has a new logo on it and support the team. It’s literally all you can really do.
