The Giants’ Triple-A affiliate caused some controversy recently over a poorly thought-out marketing stunt.
Good morning, baseball fans!
The San Francisco Giants Triple-A affiliate, the Sacramento River Cats, got themselves into some hot water recently by failing to have anyone on their marketing staff with any common sense.
According to an article written by Alex Simon of SFGate, it appears that the team recently unveiled an alternate identity, the “Gold Diggers,” that they claim was to pay homage to Northern California’s gold rush history.
This makes sense, the gold rush is a large part of Northern California’s history. We even named one of our NFL teams after it. Which means there are a lot of aspects to work with.
So the intentions, as stated, seemed to be good. The execution, however, well that’s where things went awry.
Rather than going with the theme they claimed to have been inspired by when planning their marketing strategy, the organization decided to lean into the more colloquially used version of the phrase. In the process, they unveiled a video that I will not be including, but you can find it in the linked article above.
Here is how Simon describes the video:
On Thursday, the team unveiled the alternate branding via a promotional video that seemed to lean into another meaning of “gold digger,” depicting two women with cartoon dollar signs in their eyes at seeing the new Gold Diggers uniform and hat. One of the women was significantly younger than her apparent husband — with whom she seemed to have just left a jewelry store, wearing a large and expensive new ring on her finger.
That’s…..not good. That’s about six miles, a right turn, and three generations from good.
But if you ask River Cats President and COO Chip Maxson (and “Good Day Sacramento” did just that), well they worked really hard on it, you see. They wanted to be fun and innovative!
It makes you wonder, do they not have any women on their staff? Anyone with any common sense? I’m no marketing expert, but to me it seems like it’s probably not a good move to alienate approximately 50% of the population in promotional content meant to attract fans to the park.
But what do I know. I’m just a woman who’s been watching baseball my whole life and writing about it for a decade. And I’m sick of regularly being used as the butt of the joke from the sport that I love.
I’m sure there will be plenty of people that intentionally miss the point, arguing that it’s not that deep, it’s just a joke, it’s a play on words, etc.. But there are two problems with that argument.
First, jokes should be funny. As the late comedian George Carlin noted, the key to comedy is not to punch down. Using an outdated stereotype to portray women isn’t just punching down, it’s lazy and unoriginal. And it’s not funny.
Women were forced by law to be dependent upon men for financial security until only very recently. It was only during my mother’s lifetime that women gained the ability to pursue their own financial success and independence. Which means that the women of my generation are the first in my family to have been born with the ability to have a bank account, own a business, buy a house, etc. without a husband or male relative being in charge of it. And I’m a millennial.
So if you still want to make a joke about it, maybe punch up at the society that didn’t allow us to pursue our own financial freedoms before the 1960s & 1970s.
Second, let’s say it was just supposed to be a play on words with the intention of paying homage to local history. There are plenty of ways to organize and promote that without going for the low-hanging fruit of a sexist joke. If the theme was the area’s ties to the gold rush, go with panning, mining gear, amazing fake beards, something that actually fits the theme. But they didn’t.
The River Cats, and honestly MLB in general, could learn a lot from the Savannah Bananas about how to do something fun and innovative that doesn’t punch down at women, but actually includes them in the fun.