The Undeniable Creep of Baseball's Backstop Ads
Want to know how rich your favorite baseball team is? Just take a look behind home plate. Once you notice the differences, they are hard to un-see.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about un-missable advertisements 🙈. (Don’t forget to vote at the end of this post!)
Reader Advisory: There’s a chance this article will significantly impact your MLB viewing experience. If you don’t notice the ads that are increasingly popping up behind home plates (and on pitching mounds) across the majors, close this tab and go back to watching baseball in bliss. Once you start tracking such things, you might not be able to un-see the changes. On the other hand, if you already find yourself constantly taking note of glowing backstops, well then welcome. This post is for you.
I knew that MLB backstops have changed in recent years. I just didn’t know by how much.
Look at Camden Yards, which brought retro aesthetics to MLB parks after opening in 1992. Here’s what the Baltimore backstop looked like in 2016.
10 years later, it’s retained much of its beauty—just with a few more ads.
There have been more significant changes at St. Louis’ Busch Stadium.
Ad and camera placements seem to be made in conjunction these days, opening up commercial real estate that stretches from behind the pitcher well into the stands.1
When home plate ads were first being considered in the 1990s, then-Yankees owner George Steinbrenner reportedly pushed back. “He thought it was a slippery path to a bad place,” former Detroit Tigers exec Len Perna told SBJ in 2022.
30+ years on, this is how far we’ve slid.
Club Sportico has compiled images from 2016 and 2026 for each MLB stadium. New York does have ads behind the dish, though it hasn’t changed them much over the last decade. Other teams have been more aggressive.
You can slide your way around all 30 ballparks here.
Teams/networks now also digitally insert their own ads on top of existing placements for away games, which can lead to even more distraction.
Watching NESN’s coverage of a recent Red Sox game in Toronto via MLB.TV, I was mystified to see the ball disappear mid-pitch through a digitally-placed FanDuel ad. Did they really need the third logo?2
I can’t blame franchises for their decorating decisions. Outside of the biggest markets, TV money is increasingly imperiled. Faster games further cut down on advertising opportunities. The Yanks and Dodgers don’t have to scrounge for every sponsorship buck, but the Guardians and Pirates have more reason to. And the backstop is a veritable piggy bank. Home plate signage generated $1.9 billion in sponsor media value in 2024, according to Relo Metrics.
Everyone anticipates major changes for baseball next year, with a new CBA and potential salary cap on the table. I don’t expect the sport’s leaders to pause in the middle of all of that to address matters of design. Advertising has steadily encroached across sports since the COVID-19 pandemic gave leagues extra reason to capitalize where they could, and the sponsorship genie isn’t being shoved back in the bottle anytime soon. It’s worth noting that the digital replacement tech has gotten better, at least to my eye. Though that might just lead teams to push the envelope even further.
The one new MLB stadium in our sample offers a glimmer of hope…
Arlington, Tex.’s Globe Life Field opened in 2020 with the typical backstop replaced by sunken suites. There are still plenty of ads on-screen, and the box crowd doesn’t offer the same enthusiasm as packed stands, but I can’t complain. At least there are live, human faces behind the batter, rather than a billboard.
Eben’s ⚡ Take: Given that many of these billboards are digital and considering how virtually every streaming service now offers expensive ad-free and cheaper ad-supported tiers, I wonder how far we are from that reality as sports fans. Want to watch the Orioles with the classic brick background? Pay up for RSN Premium™️! Otherwise, prepare to watch the team like they’re playing in Times Square. ~Sigh~
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
Eagle-eyed viewers will also likely spot additional ads placed strategically around the stadium to appear in the background of player close-ups…
Here’s an even harder find-the-ball challenge.
This is a rare Big 4 sports critique where I feel like my automatic "the NHL actually does this better" canned response is un-usable!
I'm not condoning the decisions, but it's not thought of as a zero-sum game. The theory is that by using the digital replacements they can customize the advertising to different markets (including international) and create more value by targeting the ads than they can with a single advertiser. Essentially creating a larger than zero-sum to split up.