I’ve noticed in recent weeks many people among those who I follow on Twitter complaining about being signed up to Major League Baseball mailing lists. I can count myself in as one of the people pissed off by this. It seems that MLB has been signing people up, unknown to them, to mailing lists whenever someone orders online tickets for a game. I went to a game back in June, and had ordered tickets online through bluejays.com. Since ordering I then started getting mail from MLB or the Blue Jays all the time. I unsubscribed only to discover that I was still getting mail. I believe I was signed up to at least 4 different mailing lists, all of which needed to be unsubscribed from individually.

To me this is dirty pool by MLB. I know myself, and I’m sure many others out there that would consider themselves “web savvy”, can pick out a mailing list opt in at 10 paces anywhere on the web. Companies try to be crafty and trick you into joining, but I am always on the lookout for stuff like that when I give out my email when signing up for products and services. Given the fact that many other people are falling for this means MLB must be doing something sneaky, either not divulging that you are being signed up for multiple MLB mailing lists, or obscuring it somewhere on the page. C’mon MLB, I wasn’t born yesterday, I’ve been using the web for almost 14 years now.

The fact MLB would even do this in this day and age seems pretty stupid. Given that people hate being spammed, you would think they would be a little smarter with how they handle that kind of stuff. It creates animosity between your local team and the fans when they are constantly being carpet bombed with email. You would figure they wouldn’t want to alienate their fans like that.

This all just reminds me of this episode of the Simpsons. Maybe Mark McGwire will show up at my house to hit a few dingers.

Original commercial

Now I’ve seen this commercial a bunch of times and have been left wondering these questions

• How does the death of General Motors equate to 1 legged athletes? I suppose you could draw the parallel that GM has been running on one leg when competing with Toyota, Honda and the rest.
• There was a time when 8 different brands made sense? I can’t recall it. Competing against yourself in every market segment seemed like a pretty stupid idea from the get go.
• What’s with the hockey stock photo? Is GM implying they got Bertuzzi’d by the rest of the auto industry?
• Ben Roethlisberger(I’m such a sports nerd I actually spelled that correctly first try) throwing a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl? I’m assuming they’re trying to infer a come from behind victory here. Instead when I think of yellow and black and GM I think of the Pontiac Aztek.
• What does man landing on the moon, Sugar Ray Robinson and the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies have to do with GM? I’m guessing the Phillies reference is trying to establish an underdog status for GM. GM is still the largest automaker in the world, that’s like the NY Yankees trying to cast themselves as scrappy underdogs.

Probably a more truthful spoof version of that commercial

This whole “reinvention” angle is just marketing spin.  Since most of us North Americans are now begrudging, collective owners of this company I can’t help but feel that GM should stop wasting our taxpayer dollars on marketing FUD. There is a reason GM got here in the first place, trying to gloss over the whole issue isn’t going to fool anyone.

Roy Halladay's Windup

Corina and I were at the Jays game on Tuesday night to see Roy Halladay pitch against the LA Angels of Anaheim. For some reason I knew Tuesday was going to be a special game. Roy threw a complete game, struck out a career high 14 batters and threw a career high 133 pitches. I can’t recall, but it’s possible this is the first time I had seen Roy pitch at the Dome. I typically see a game or 2 a season and it never seemed to fall on a day he was pitching. Tuesday’s game was awesome. Roy had bit of trouble in 7th giving up 4 runs on 3 singles, a walk, passed ball and 2 sacrifice flies. He then buckled down and struck out 5 in the last 2 innings to finish off the game. It was quite amazing.

As usual Roy is piling up the wins and is putting together another stellar season. And again it looks like he’s going to get jobbed out of a second Cy Young by another pitcher having a career year in Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals. Last year it was Cliff Lee, who came out of nowhere to grab the Cy Young award while pitching for a mediocre Cleveland Indians team. Roy has consistently been one of the top pitchers in the American league since 2002 and pitches in the toughest division in baseball. The Jays have a chance on Friday to rough up Zack Greinke, so hopefully they can slap him around a bit and make a dent in that ridiculous ERA he’s got so far this season.