I’m old enough to remember when some games featured a ceremonial first pitch, but most did not. When throwing a ceremonial first pitch was an honor.
First pitches for sale, like so much else
Harry How
As Andrew Keh writes in The New York Times, those days are long gone:
Sometimes, there are ceremonial second, third, fourth and fifth pitches. The day after making his major league debut this month, John Gast, a promising pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, crouched up and down to catch five pitches. The honorees that day were Edward Jones, a financial planning company; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the Washington University School of Medicine; a local radio station; and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
"The ceremonial first pitch summons echoes of baseball as the American game, the game of civic consciousness, local identity and body-politic attachment," said John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball. "Once you get away from politicians and leaders and national heroes, and you get down to not even local heroes, but the guy who sold the most cars off the Dodge lot, the proposition gets devalued."
Throwing out the first pitch was once considered an honor. Now, like so many other things, it’s simply a commodity to be bought and sold. What’s been missing in baseball for some time is a willingless to simply say no to the marketing department.
Or rather, no more often. It’s worth pointing out that teams have so far resisted the temptation to slather uniforms with advertisements. Well, except when playing in Japan. And the temptation to superimpose ads on the playing field. Well, except in Toronto. You might recall that nine years ago, Major League Baseball planned to feature promotions for the latest Spider-Man movie on actual bases during actual games; that one was shot down, probably by widespread vitriol among the Knights of the Keyboard.
But we must remain ever-vigilant, friends. Right now, there are literally hundreds of people working for baseball teams whose sole purpose is filling the clubs’ coffers with advertising moneys, and they consider the game on the field, and whatever pleasures you take in viewing that game, utterly irrelevant. Only the short-term dollars in the short-term coffers matter to them. And they will do whatever you allow them to do.
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