When I sit down on a barstool in my favorite watering hole in Peoria, Illinois to watch game 6 of the World Series Tuesday night, I will be proudly wearing the “Chicago Cubs: NL Champs” t-shirt I just bought.
What the shirt is missing, thankfully, is the phrase “MLB AUTHENTIC COLLECTION” anywhere on it. The shirt is not an authentic MLB product, and I bought it because I do not want to have a shirt with the league’s insipid marketing logo anywhere on it.
Major League Baseball charges a ridiculous premium for their wares, something that is perfectly within their right to do. But the extent to which they currently do it is stretching the bounds of what the market will bear.
The law of supply and demand dictates that as the price of a nonessential good (my shirt, for instance) goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. The additional money the seller receives from the higher price is tempered by the loss of money from the reduction in sales, so the trick is to find the price that maximizes revenue.
At the moment, MLB must be pretty close to that price point. Forty-dollar t-shirts make even the biggest fan think twice before buying something, even if the shirt itself is made from a luxurious cotton blend that massages the skin as it’s worn.
When a perfectly acceptable shirt can be had for less than half that price, most people will choose that option without thinking twice—even people who pride themselves on being law-abiding Americans who would never steal or take more than one Snickers fun-sized bar from a house at Halloween.
The league fights such copyright infringement vigorously, constantly surfing web sites in pursuit of violators. It’s a losing game, though. A person with a $500 screen press machine and a modicum of ability can make a Cubs World Series shirt that looks “official” or, given the dreck that MLB sells these days, much better than what passes as official. A seller with chutzpah can get on Etsy or eBay for 48 hours and get a few hundred sales before their cease and desist letter arrives.
And it turns out the latter isn’t that hard, because most of the licensed shirts being sold under the auspices of MLB are, in a word, hideous. For instance, there’s a shirt that reads “RAISE THE FLAG” and has a pennant with the word “champions” overlaid onto it, and the design looks like the work of a third-grader from art class.
That the MLB is not only selling junk but charging way too much for it exacerbates their competition problem. If they refuse to make a compelling product and don’t want to reduce prices, and it’s logistically impossible to stamp out all competition, what is the only thing left? MLB has decided it must be to somehow give their wares some sort of patina of exclusivity so that people perceive value in buying an item that is licensed. If they won’t do it out of honesty, then induce them to do it, because the MLB-licensed stuff will have some cachet about it.
Which is why the Cubs’ and Cleveland Indians’ managers have been wearing World Series sweatshirts that have the MLB Authentic Collection certification featured prominently on the chest.
However, this banal merchandising strategy makes the league’s products even less palatable, and it compelled me to swear off the MLB site. I found something on Etsy that pronounced the Cubs National League champions and nothing else that cost me half of what MLB charges. It arrived in time for the series—MLB could not deliver anything before the series ended—and it seems to be one of those lucky garments, since I wore it while watching Chicago’s game five victory.
I’m wearing it for game six, as well, as long as the long arms of Major League Baseball don’t catch up with me first.
