It’s just a patch.
Baseball purists, and there not many of them around anymore, are probably going to be upset. It appears Major League Baseball owners are exploring the possibility of tapping into a new revenue source. Uniform ads. After all there is money to be made from product placement even on a piece of dirty sports laundry. That may not sit well with sports traditionalists but money is money. There is advertising on the shirts already, a team name or logo or the city that the team calls home along with the MLB logo and the shirt manufacturer’s logo. Selling uniform space is more for television purposes anyway because most people in the stadium will ignore a small uniform patch pitching a company. It is video product placement when there is a tight shot of a player. Major League Baseball has had uniform ads in the past in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and during the 2019 Tokyo and London series. All of the uniform game ads were in international markets not the U. S. or Canada. MLB was just following host countries practices. Uniform ads were fine.
In 2017, the National Basketball Association began putting one ad on a uniform and the ad has not diminished that product. The NBA owned G League and the Women’s National Basketball Association had uniform advertising prior to 2017. Football kits or soccer uniforms globally have corporate sponsors on both the front and back of the shirt. It doesn’t seem that having advertising on the uniforms has hurt international football at all. NASCAR drivers have sponsors all over their clothes and cars. Golfers and tennis players are walking billboards for companies. That is the way of the sports world as marketers feel they can reach target audiences with advertising everywhere including dirty laundry. Sports is just business even though the traditionalists may think otherwise.
