Americans love a scandal. We hawk our twitter accounts, watch Entertainment Tonight and subscribe to every trashy magazine to dive into every detail about the latest celebrity gossip. The avalanche of major league baseball scandals recently earned not just sports-section coverage -but front-page news. One by one, syringe by syringe, the greatest players of our generation have crashed and burned. Baseball is now associated as the sport of cheaters, where fans must separate records with an asterisk, or wonder whose guilty or not. Of the 15 players who hit the most home runs from 1993 through 2004, 10 are said to be connected to performance-enhancing drugs by positive tests, the Mitchell Report or news reports. Manny Ramirez just earned that 10th spot.
When Ramirez, arguably the best pure hitter in the game was suspended for his use of banned substances, the public relations department for MLB must have been thinking, oh no not another. Ramirez stands to lose nearly $8 million in salary during his suspension. But Manny is just being Manny. The Dodgers had just spent the last 10 months rebranding their team with Manny as the cornerstone and now they must find a way to put this behind them. They sold 1800
Mannywood T-Shirt
Manny dreadlock wigs for $25 a piece and they named a section down the left-field line at Dodger Stadium Mannywood. The Dodgers insist their mess can be mopped away (maybe they should use the excess wigs), mostly by doing nothing at all. They may serve as a case-study for how to handle, or not, a premier player caught in the web of the league’s drug crackdown.
Manny unlike his guilty predecessor Alex Rodriguez handled his accusations much differently by staying mostly out of the spotlight and not creating a media circus via press conferences. Rodriguez on the other hand came right out on camera to admit to his wrong-doings. Most of A-Rod’s deemed success from his initial press conference has been washed away, as he has now admitted much of what he said was not true. A-Rod’s media training coach must have given him poor advice, or A-Rod is just that bad at lying. Rodriguez has a host of advisers that have been helping him through this mess, including agent Scott Boras, talent manager Guy Oseary, publicist Richard Rubenstein and a company called Outside Eyes that specializes in media strategy and crisis management. Although the press conference will go down in history as a disaster, they’re approach to confronting the issue rather than doing what Manny did and stay out the spot light will be debated by crisis managers for a long time. One good piece of advice they finally gave him was to step out of the spotlight by going on disabled list with an injury. Whether or not this was a coincidence or not, A-Rod must have been hoping that time would heal his wounds.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkpaNFYCLQ4]
So how does MLB rekindle their reputation and alleviate the blow of this crisis? Well it’s not easy, and many may argue that they don’t care what Manny, Bonds or A-Rod did, they’ll still go to the game an cheer for their favorite teams and players. While that may be true, and people do love talking and reading these scandals, no-one can argue that baseball’s brand has been tarnished. MLB teams must now be proactive about the situation putting together crisis plans….just in case one of their players is next. PR pros also must look to the Internet, the blogosphere, and the 24-hour cycle, for transforming their role and adding to the challenge of image and information control. While the role of a PR practitioner has expanded and changed, the goal to maintain reputation has not.
One positive that has come out of this whole mess is that in the times of a recession, handling crisis management or branding (re-branding rather) for MLB is a goldmine! Books are coming out left and right about who did this and who did that. Roger Clemens book is the most recent money maker. Although I have no connection to these players, whose to say I could find a way to write about the next culprit and make millions. I am in no way condoning their behavior or hoping to profit off of other people’s misfortunes, I just want to point out, that whenever a crisis happens, someone finds a way to make money.
It will be interesting to see how baseball’s reputation evolves of the next decade. Being from Philadelphia and growing up in Cleveland, I just hope one of my favorite players isn’t the next “juicer”.