On KIRO 710 radio today I heard about Major League Baseball (MLB) selling some controversial ad space. The Star Tribune says:

In the latest example of a sponsor's stamp on the sports world, ads for the movie Spider-Man 2 will be placed atop bases at 15 major league ballparks during games from June 11-13.

Then I read more of these articles and said to myself, hey it's only three days, it's not like they are going NASCAR or anything. But this does open up the doorway to your local indian casino on every basepath. I wonder if this will be — or could become — distracting for the umpires. That would be one good reason to not do this. But for the people outraged by this, please, this is only for three days and unless they are doing closeups on the bases (which with all the exposure this is getting they inevitably will) it would go largely unnoticed. This is not even close to comparable to Marlboro or Winston logos on cars at racetracks or the NASCAR Winning Circle racing interviews where the driver's keep switching hats with sponsor logos during the interviews.

Or have I gotten this all wrong and this is the beginning of the end for baseball between the lines turning into the MLB equivalent of the net's popup advertisements?

This blog entry originally appeared in the movie section of my blog where the front page is, as of this writing, decorated with Spider-Man 2 template. I think movies coming out with blog templates is a good idea, and other webmasters can decorate their blog movie category with Spiderman 2 blog templates courtesy of Sony. Without being too hypocritical, my basepaths are covered, are yours?

As for the movie, hey, I'm looking forward to it. The first Spider-Man movie was easily my favorite comic book to big screen translation.