NBA Jersey Ads and MLB's Papa Slams: Nothing Is Sacred Anymore

BREAKING: .@NBA owners last night approved uniform advertising, sources say #sportsbiz
— Scott Soshnick (@soshnick) April 15, 2016

Oh Lord, it's finally happening. The corporate cancer of advertising has breached the inner sanctum of sports and is hitting all the vitals. Lest you forget exactly who owns you, it's gigantic fucking companies.

On Friday, Bloomberg's Scott Soshnik reported that the NBA has approved advertising on its jerseys for the first time. This news comes on the heels of the new "Official Pizza of Major League Baseball" and its evil spawn, the Papa Slam. Grand slams no longer exist. They belong to your favorite obese surrogate father Papa John now.

It's hard to tell which is more infuriating. On the one hand, it's difficult to see why in God's name the NBA would need another few more inches of advertising space. Arenas are already ringed in electronic banners, chugging out an infinite loop of not-so-subliminal pleas to get you to buy whatever McWitch is currently on the menu. There are post-game sponsorships, halftime sponsorships, replay sponsorships, constant name drops by announcers, not to mention the fact that basketball games are perfectly structured for advertising—frequent time-outs at the end of the game make it such that your parting image isn't the red of a clock ticking to zero, so much as a cattle brand searing the words "Kia Sorrento" onto the back of your retinas.

The jersey was the last bastion of ad-free space, where players represent themselves and their teams only—a reminder that the game belongs to the game, and nothing else. But now, with this all-but-expected move to use corporate branding on their jerseys (as the league has done with their All-Star Jerseys in the past), the NBA will be full-on infected.

Some might ask, What's the big deal? Soccer players in Europe have had jersey sponsors for a long time, and they seem fine. Well, soccer doesn't have commercial breaks for 45-plus minutes at a time. NBA games take breaks at quarters and everything in between, so let's just leave the jerseys alone, shall we? It's already a tragedy that my hometown Golden State Warriors are better known as playing in Oracle Arena than in Oakland, California (someone just asked me yesterday if they play in Sacramento).

On the other hand, we have the MLB's Papa Slam. Behold:

With yesterday's #PapaSlam, you can enjoy 40% off regular-menu-priced pizza. Code: PAPASLAM https://t.co/VFtCMUnCTz pic.twitter.com/tdqV1ZEKS0
— MLB (@MLB) April 15, 2016

MLB suffers the same advertising saturation as the NBA, if not more so. Now the league has taken a functional element of the game and renamed it? OK, forget the NBA jerseys, this is clearly the most egregious act so far. I'm not quick to call out 1984 Orwellian dystopian references, but owning the language of baseball? That's downright sinister. Not to mention the fact that "Papa Slam" sounds like a family reunion mishap, a disgusting sexual reference, or a combination of the two. Is it cool that baseball lets you get 40 percent off of a pizza? Sure. But this is a price too high to pay. Let's just leave the discounts, and keep calling them Grand Slams, and everyone can come away happy.