LA Dodger PR disaster

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ZoWie
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LA Dodger PR disaster

Post by ZoWie »

OK, as we know, baseball teams like to have special nights where you get a ball cap or something if you buy tickets. These have traditionally included salutes to generally approved community institutions like the military, the fire department, national charities, the Red Cross, and the like.

Now they like to go after identity groups. It sells tickets, and until this year it was just a nice community unity kind of thing. LA has a lot of Spanish speakers so the Dodgers have a Hispanic Night. Several of them, in fact. More recently they have added a Pride Night. This is Los Angeles, after all, and it sells a lot of tickets.

Everything went just fine for decades, but this year they decided to invite a controversial LGBTQIA+ group which does valuable public services, but for whatever reason does so dressed up as Catholic nuns, even though they are what we used to call dudes. You know, people born with a penis and male hormones. That gender issue that seems to be such a Thing right now.

Now, Baseball is in itself kind of a Thing, like apple pie on Washington's Birthday and flags on July 4th, and it tends to avoid controversy for reasons that relate to having such a wide and diverse appeal. It's better for the team not to do controversy. They sell more tickets that way. Usually the teams are pretty good at avoiding stuff that hurts PR, but this time, oops.

Things went as well as could be expected until one of the pitchers, who will remain unnamed, got offended and went public with the fact that he is a devout Christian (first anyone knew) and he does not want to be identified with a team that would honor such a group. The situation is, of course, made worse by the fact that this year's Dodger pitching is the most miserable spectacle since Noah's flood, and now they'd pissed off one of the few people left on the Dodgers who can still consistently get batters out.

The reaction from the Dodgers was silent, which those of us who understand such things in the entertainment industry knew wouldn't help. Sure enough, all of the Nooz stories, and there were many of them, ended with things like "Dodger sources declined to comment." In the PR business, everyone knows that means, "We have opted to shoot ourselves in the head rather than tell our side of the story, because we know that saying anything at all will make the problem worse." In other words, it is akin to a Samurai committing harakiri.

This situation lasted about a week, until they committed the second deadliest PR sin, which was to announce that they had dropped the group from Pride Night. Now they've pissed off the LGBTQIA+ side too.

At this point they must have hired one of those expensive crisis damage control PR experts, because they have since issued statements that they have (1) reinstated the group (pissing the Christians off further), and (2) decided to also hold a Faith Night which will (presumably) be all about that old time religion (giving the strong impression that they are punting).

None of this matters much if you're a first place team, but this year's Dodgers are having what college football coaches used to call a building year, and it's not helping AT ALL. They hung a curve ball with a .400 hitter up at the plate.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22
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