Supreme Court to hear "Major League Baseball v. Fantasy Owners, Fans, and Common Sense'

The Los Angeles Times reported today that one of the cases on the docket for this Supreme Court session involves a lawsuit filed by Major League Baseball, which wants to restrict the use of team and player names for fantasy baseball use to those who pay for the rights to them. (This on the heels of an AP story citing Commissioner Bud Selig's ruling that Little League teams can only have rights to MLB team names if purchasing their uniforms from the MLB's authorized supplier)

The licensing of names is a legitimate concern for many - I shouldn't be able to open a Michael Jordan's restaurant, nor should I be able to launch my own line of Air Jordan sneakers - but to me these steps by Major League Baseball send a terrible message to the fans, even if, legally, they are just.

My solution? Let Major League Baseball license its team names to the highest bidders, and let Little Leaguers and rotisserie fans suffer. Sure, without creating a next generation of fans by allowing them to fantasize about being Red Sox, Yankees, and Devil Rays (or is it just Rays?), and without providing adults with a compelling interest in its 162 games each year, the sport would suffer a fate similar to the NHL (or itself in the mid-nineties), relegated to Channel 325 on most cable dials. But fans will be fans, and if the product on the field - sunny Sundays, the smell of hot dogs and sound of bat cracking ball, and countless other pieces of American nostalgia - remains what it is, the MLB should be able to pass its costs on through middlemen (Majestic Athletic, its 'official supplier of Little League uniforms, and ESPN, Yahoo, and CBS Sportsline for fantasy baseball) to the fans, gouging us once more like an $8 beer, $15 parking voucher, or advertising-generated 1 a.m. World Series finish. In the end, the fans will pay, somewhat unknowingly, and the league can continue to overspend in the free agent market.

Where is the solution? It's all about name licensing - and here is where the fans (should) have the upper hand. In my mind, the single-greatest marketing achievement of professional sports is the fact that each team is aligned with a city, creating a sense of allegiance for even casual fans to one particular team. Growing up in Michigan, I identified with the Detroit Tigers, Pistons, and Lions before I was old enough to know the rules of each game, and have stayed with that loyalty ever since. The same is true across the country - fans identify with their teams if only due to the marketing that assigns a logo and team of representatives to that city. Cleveland Browns fans are a terrific example - that team in brown and orange isn't at all the team that they rooted for in the 80s, which is now the pride-and-joy of Baltimore. But this new, expansion variety bears the Cleveland branding, and the fans revel in the ability to wear the jerseys, chant the slogans, and buy the merchandise. It's no coincidence that the MLB's Angels have shifted geographic brands in search of the right quantity of loyalty - California was too big, Anaheim was too small, and the Goldilocked front office decided that Los Angeles was just right, even if it had its own team and resided 20+ miles (and several hours' worth of traffic) north.

Which all leads me to the solution - if sports teams want to license their names to squeeze every penny out of them, fans should have the right to expect the same protection. The "Los Angeles" in Los Angeles Dodgers is infinitely more important than "Dodgers" - few in Southern California care that anything east of the Mojave exists at all, so virtually no non-Brooklyintes would care about a team from Western Long Island if it weren't branded as LA's native team. So why shouldn't we Angelenos have licensing rights to the name of the city in which we live? The most important brands that sports franchises possess belong to the communities in which they reside - and the same communities that they seek to exploit with tactics such as this Supreme Court case. If the suit holds, precedent should be used to ensure that the cities that host teams are fairly compensated for the use of their names - and the teams, by my calculations, would have a hefty price to pay.

Naturally, the idea is a pipe dream - geographic names are exempt from licensing rights, to the dismay of oft-branded parties like the City of Hollywood, State of California, and Amerigo Vespucci (who, if alive, would have one heck of a lawsuit on his hands for all that the Western Hemisphere uses his name). Still, the point remains that professional teams should realize that their considerable revenue comes from the naming rights of their cities that they are permitted to use. Part of that should come with responsibility back to those communities, in the form of enabling kids to use the animal (and laundry) names that follow, and anyone to use the public-record statistics for amusement. For too long, fans have had to sit silent while ticket prices, team values, and player salaries have risen exponentially; they should at least be able to do so while knowing that the leagues will continue to let them enjoy the sports that they have come to identify with.