Creative Crackdowns

The Cubs are looking for a court order that will allow them to go after vendors selling knockoff merchandise.  On the one hand, I sympathize; people shouldn’t be allowed to steal someone else’s work.  On the other hand, it’s the Cubs.

On a slightly more serious note, I do think it’s wrong to try and pass knockoff stuff as the real deal.  Shame on you, go to jail, we confiscate your inventory.  Now, for the serious on the other hand—a little creativity will be lost along the way.

For example, one of the offending t-shirts shows Marilyn Monroe wearing a Cubs’ jersey.  Sorry, that strikes me as smart and funny, not actionable.  In fact, once upon a time baseball merchandise generally was sold without regard to MLB copyright.  At least the souvenir pennants were.

I have a hundred or so, nearly all dating to before 1969, the year baseball started to slap its copyright on stuff.  Before then, pennants were an exercise in the imagination.  Individual ball clubs might have tried to keep the bootleggers at bay, or away from the park, but it’s debatable how successful they were.  Anyone with access to rolls of felt and silk-screening machines could have a go at it.  Let me give you an example from out of the collection.

I have four different “scroll” pennants for the 1959 AL-pennant winning Sox team; each pennant has a scroll listing the names of players and manager Al Lopez.  Not one official scroll pennant, mind you, but five, probably all done by different people.  And the designer of one of the five apparently didn’t have access to a scorecard or newspaper.  The name of team owner Bill Veeck is misspelled “Veek”; by-then minority owner Chuck Comiskey is “Commiskey”; and outfielder Jim Rivera is “Riviera.”  Needless to say, the pennant is a prized possession of mine.

I also have a Yankee scroll pennant from 1960.  Somehow, the managed to get Bill Skowron’s name right, but not Duke Maas (“Mass”), Luis Arroyo (“Arrowy”) or Joe DeMaestri (“De Maestry”).  Gosh, the Big Apple making the same kind of mistakes like in Chicago.  No wonder the Yankees lost to the Pirates in seven.  There has to be a “Mazarowsky” on a scroll somewhere.

So, guys, if you’re going to go after purveyors of bogus merchandise, start with the knockoffs before moving onto the creative types and the misspellers, OK?