Tag: Fanatics

Fanatics claims it owns your kids’ likeness rights, forever

Fanatics has their latest cost-cutting scheme, and it’s trying to get perpetual likeness rights from children and potential future minor leaguers years before they go pro.

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Thanks to some excellent reporting from Britt Ghiroli at The Athletic, we now know what the latest chapter in the “everything Fanatics touches is terrible in some way” saga is. Fanatics is partnering together with Perfect Game, the “world’s largest baseball scouting service” which serves as both a showcase for amateur players and a high-level competitive environment for amateur baseball, in order to create memorabilia for these kids. Sounds innocent enough, right? Of course there’s another layer to all of this.

Perfect Game already had kids giving up the rights to their likenesses, as agents have been warning parents for a couple of years now about the practice, but, as Scott Boras told Ghiroli, “They have now gotten into profit-taking on this.” Amateurs can’t have agents, but agents can advise them, and not signing is one thing they’re being advised about now.

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MLBPA picks up a win, awful uniforms will see changes

And the Players Association would like everyone to know Fanatics wasn’t the issue here.

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Not every labor win has to wait for bargaining. Take the recent issue with MLB’s uniforms, for instance: in short, they’re terrible, and now they’ll be fixed. The when of that is a bit more up in the air — according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, it’ll be early 2025 at the latest — but hey. The players won, despite the defense of MLB this spring basically being a gaslighting, “no, we’ve always been able to see your balls.”

It’s not just that the fabric was see through, either. Pants and tops didn’t match. The lettering on the jerseys was small, and looked like it belonged on children’s replica jerseys. The pants would rip at seemingly the drop of a hat. The supposedly breathable fabric of the new-style jerseys resulted in a lot of pictures of players absolutely dripping with sweat from games played during the coldest part of the season. It was all a terrible experiment in… well, in who knows what, really. The kind of innovation companies always looking to make more money or cut costs play around with, that results in messing with what already works in a way that makes it worse? The Google, if you would. Nike didn’t need to do any of what they did here, with the players even warning them they didn’t like the directions they were taking, and yet, here we are.

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Notes: Manfred’s legacy, uniforms, ‘collusion’

What will we remember Rob Manfred for, plus the latest on the pants, and the use of the “c-word”

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For Baseball Prospectus this week, I covered what commissioner Rob Manfred’s legacy could be (paid subscription required). It’s not a simple question, really, for two reasons: one, by the time Manfred leaves the role after the 2028 season, he’ll have been commissioner for nearly a decade-and-a-half, and two, there seems to be some new embarrassing thing he’s yelling about pretty much constantly.

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