FanHouse MySpace

On Wednesday, I told you about the MySpace page of the Cubs' fansite/store Cubbie Baseball being shut down at the request of Major League Baseball. My gut reaction was to blame baseball for crushing fan interest yet again (I wasn't alone, you can check out the BBTF discussion thread of the incident here), but King Kaufman at Salon thinks I may have jumped the gun:

The bigger problem here is MySpace, which summarily dumped the Cubbies Baseball page rather than asking McGraw to remove the offending logos and trademarks, which would have been easy for it to do and easy for him to do.

"We have an affiliate program that grants him a license to display and point to our shop using the [team] marks in that manner," says MLB.com spokesman Matt Gould. "In this specific case, that was granted only for his Web site."

I think this is a much more valid stance for Major League Baseball to have than I originally assumed. It seems harmless for Bryan McGraw to extend his license (and thus business) to MySpace, but allowing him to do so opens the door up for others with affiliate licenses to do so in a more harmful way.

On top of that, the MySpace page (the Google cache is no longer available, sorry) was designed in a way that someone viewing it without knowledge of what it was could easily be confused into thinking that it was actually the Cubs' page, and I don't have to tell you why neither the Cubs nor Major League Baseball would want that. It looks like, for once, MLB isn't the villain here after all.

Thanks to fellow 'Hauser Larry Brown for sending the Salon link along.

Cubbies Baseball, a website that describes itself as, "YOUR online portal for the Cubs," has had its MySpace page deleted without warning after Major League Baseball apparently requested that Myspace shut down all MLB MySpace pages. The owner left this message on his personal MySpace blog:

Are you wondering what happened to the Cubbies Baseball MySpace page? I was too..

Without notification from MySpace, the Cubbies Baseball MySpace page was shut down last Thursday and over 3,000 of our friends were left in the dark.

Since then I have learned that Major League Baseball had asked that MySpace close down any Major League Baseball MySpace pages. We still aren't sure the reason, nor has MySpace replied to my numerous emails.

Its unfortunate that MLB won't let fans appreciate their product and it is also unfotunate that MySpace can pull the plug on hard work without blinking.

You can still find the cached page here. I thought it was because it just seems to be a store, but the owner of the site says that they're an affiliate of Major League Baseball and all the same stuff seems to be available on the website, which hasn't been taken down. All we can do is assume that Major League Baseball hates its fans and is dead set against appealing to anyone under the age of 50. But we knew that already.

Via BBTF.

Several months back The FanHouse reported that Yahoo! was negotiating to purchase Rivals.com. That effort stalled for unknown reasons, although it was speculated that questionable business practices by a Rivals executive had tripped the deal.

However, several more months have passed and the two sides have reached a suitable agreement. What it all means is anyone's guess, but the acquisition makes a little more sense than the Scout.com/MySpace merger reported recently in this space.

Rivals is already publishing some content on the Yahoo! Sports platform but I haven't seen Yahoo! content circulate in Rivals sites. These are strange days where recruiting sites - once the basement business and realm of the 900 number for updates - sell for millions of dollars to former Silicon Valley search engines gone big business.

I have yet to locate a sale price but will update this as we find out more about this merger.

Update: TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! paid $100 million to complete the sale. A very gracious hat tip to reader Jason of Eleven Warriors.

Tyler Clippard -- who should forever be referred to as "Yankee Clippard" -- has had an interesting and generationally telling influx of support from his friends after his first career win for the Yankees Sunday night. Like so many in our hip little millenial generation, Tyler has received much of his love via his MySpace page, which is currently open and available to the public.

Most of the comments are the standard stuff, some congratulations from some friends and some (usually attractive) ladies. (Nice work, Tyler.) Instead, what's most interesting about this, as Jim Baumbach writes on Newsday, is that this is in many ways a signal of the entry into sports of those who have grown up with the internet as an indispensable communication tool. That's a trend that's not going away, and that's changing the way we access our favorite players teams just as much as the television did in the middle of the 20th century.

Then again, some comments are interesting, especially this one:

hey dude,
thanks for driving the other night, it was good seein ya. ill be back in a week, annnnd the ill be legal to drink and it will be a lot sweeter. ha.
anyway, have a good one in training, see ya next week hopefully.
stefs

Um, yeah. I'm all for the open-air ethic of the internet ... but Tyler might want to consider deleting that sort of thing. Just a suggestion, Yankee Clippard.