A few months back, when baseball announced its partnership with cryptocurrency exchange FTX, I speculated that they were going to launch their own cryptocurrency called Ruthcoin. My hopes, though, were dashed when the sport limited FTX’s reach to just putting patches on the umpires’ uniforms. The umpires! No one likes them! Now people will just associate crypto with an insular community of assholes who everyone wishes would get over their own bullshit. Quelle horreur!
Now everybody’s worst fears are coming true: baseball is falling behind in crypto. As it has in so many areas, the NBA has taken the lead. As of Christmas, one of their marquee arenas, currently known as the Staples Center, will be known as the Crypto.com Arena.
This is a huge blow to baseball. As I discussed in June, MLB is betting on reaching a new generation of fans not through prosaic measures like making the games affordable or easy to watch online or easy to watch on TV or encouraging players to show emotion on the field thus giving young fans reason to get excited themselves or other dumb stuff no one cares about, but rather through the best bet available: cryptocurrency. It’s the wave of the future, if the future is rich people giving MLB a bunch of money so that they can be richer, which is generally a pretty good bet.
If Rob Manfred was really serious about growing the game, he would have moved heaven and earth to ensure that Major League Baseball was the first sports league to have a stadium endorsed by crypto. He’s obviously not afraid of stadiums with dumb, awful, embarrassing names, if Guaranteed Rate Field and LoanDepot Park are anything to judge by. But he drew the line at Crypto.com, for some reason, as if the Crypto.com Angels Stadium wouldn’t have brought in a lot of money.
I just thought the league believed in this, you know? I thought they understood the wave of the future. Instead, they’re stranded on shore, watching all the cooler people go into the ocean and hang out and invite each other to parties which baseball won’t even hear about until someone a month later is like “Man, I can’t believe Ariana Grande showed up to Dave's place that night.”
Sure, someone could say that allowing some crypto site to sponsor a stadium is a sign of a total lack of a values system. An argument could be made that crypto is inherently a pyramid scheme which relies on masses of people buying into something ultimately worthless so that early adopters can make boatloads of money before the inevitable crash. A person could even, if they were so inclined, insist that cryptocurrency is a symbol of America’s decline, with people lining up to throw money at a well-advertised nothing in the hopes of making more money, instead of investing in a business that makes products which improve people’s lives.
That person could go on to say that a person chasing a quick buck made off the backs of the suckers who invest after him is merely attempting to perpetuate systems of inequality, that the false utopian promises made by tech companies for decades have always been smokescreens upon which they raise venture capital, that an anti-government worldview exemplified by cryptocurrency necessarily lends itself to messianic authoritarian delusions and manic conspiratorial thinking.
Poppycock. Steph Curry has a bored ape avatar on Twitter, which is an NFT thing, which is at least cousins with being a crypto thing, so therefore all of this is cool and good. Shohei Ohtani became FTX’s new Brand Ambassador and owns a part of the company, so every part of this is extremely legitimate. Would stars like that just tout the virtues of any old company that gave them a bunch of money to tout their virtues? Not likely!
The future is here, and the NBA got its share first. It’s going to be tough for MLB to catch up, but they clearly have no choice. No matter how much they embarrass themselves, no matter how pathetic it looks now, no matter how ridiculous it looks in 5 years when people look back on this fad with befuddlement, Major League Baseball has got to keep chasing that dragon. If they give up now, they might never forgive themselves for missing out on a bunch of money that they could have been paid.