Class Action Debt Fan Financing

Baseball games on television are, just by the way the sport is played out, going to have a lot of commercials. Two commercial breaks per full inning means you’re having about 18, and that doesn’t include ones in-between pitching changes, extra-inning games, etc. Over a full season you’re gonna see a lot of the same commercials over again. (This year I’ve noticed “The New York based people of Italian descent admiring a sandwich” for Subway), but you’re also gonna get things that are there to kill time.

I’ve noticed in the past few season, that a fair amount of ads during Diamondbacks games are for Class-Action lawsuits.

A quick primer on those, just in case: A company does something for a long time that leads to a negative consequence for the consumers of one of their products, and because of that a lawsuit happens for financial retribution for people suffering because of that. (Usually it’s not-great side effects of medication or some other medical procedure.) I don’t want to make light of those things themselves, because something like that happening to people and them suffering because of it is awful, I sometimes wonder how current these lawsuits are because I’ve seen the same ones for a few years and they’re all universally in a 4:3 aspect ratio (as noted in the tweet above.)

A similar commercial genre to this involves shady looking debt refinancing services. Basically if you really went on a bender for a few years and somehow owed the Internal Revenue Service a boatload of cash, these people would allegedly make it so that you would owe less money per month. Through magic or intense negotiations, the IRS would be like “Okay, whatever.” The famous aspect ratio for tube televisions made in the 90s was still there.

Of course, with little mental stretching, and a little heightened sense of “well crap, I need a column idea this week.”, you could stretch this sort of thinking to the Diamondbacks.

The previous regime that put us on the brink of a tenuous, possibly, maybe, we’ll see how it goes rebuilding situation is gone, but that means we can’t get our financial pound of flesh from Dave Stewart. If we form together for a class action lawsuit, he will probably settle and give us something waaaaaaaay more valuable, like the original painting of Guernica. (Do not ask Dave Stewart where he got it.)

Also, a rebuild, should it come, is a sort of debt financing of baseball. You could freefall into tax hell, or you could go on a 60 degree angle to it that has some sort of possibility of getting back up. Just don’t google “Sisyphus”.

But really, stretching metaphors aside, I have to imagine it is pretty hard to fill all the commercial timeslots of all the television games of a team like the Diamondbacks, especially in the smaller (Tucson and others) markets of FSNAZ. When the “local” section of advertising comes up, and Eegees doesn’t return your calls, someone probably just yells “F*** it, throw some B-Roll up there!”

Really, that’s for the cable companies to worry about. It’s all filler between innings anyway, and it’s not like I’m going to- Oooh, what’s this? Supplementary medical insurance? Looks like it was filmed in 2003? Time to back up the money truck!