Shohei Ohtani is one of the most complete and influential players currently in the Major League, the North American baseball league, the best in the world. He arrived at the Los Angeles Angels from Japan in 2018 and has already made the history of the league. He is famous above all because he knows how to bat and pitch with very high performances and comparable only to those of Babe Ruth, legendary player of the New York Yankees and of baseball from a century ago.
With his rare qualities he was voted rookie of the year in 2018, best player of 2021, cover man of the latest edition of The Show (the reference baseball video game) and best player of the World Cup held last March, which he won by beating the United States in the final.
At 29 years old last July, he has yet to enter the best phase of a baseball player’s career. He still plays with the Angels, a second-tier team that never makes the playoffs, but he only has one year left on his contract, for which the Angels have guaranteed him $30 million. At the end of this season he will be able to reach agreements with other teams: in the United States everyone expects that when this happens many Major League spending records will be broken.
In the meantime, this season Ohtani has stopped pitching after damaging the ligaments of an elbow, and therefore he is working even harder as a hitter: for now he is second in the league in terms of number of home runs hit (44 against 51 for the first ). He made one of his latest a few days ago and it produced a series of rather curious consequences that say something about the impact he is having in North America.
In late August the Angels played a three-game series in New York against the Mets. In one of these games Ohtani hit a home run and the ball he hit hit a bright billboard which at the time was showing a promotional campaign for the US brewery Coors. The hit of the ball knocked out a module of the panel, which blackened, creating a small dark square. In itself it could have been a negligible incident, but the company saw an opportunity in it.
Coors is neither the official beer supplier of the Major League, nor the official sponsor of the championship, much less of Ohtani, whose contracts with sponsors involve large multinationals and are already worth 35 million dollars a year (to get an idea, the other MLB players do not exceed 5 million annually). However, to exploit the accident, the company immediately started a small online campaign through the Rethink advertising agency, re-proposing the image of the LED wall broken with the addition of a small slogan, «hits the spot», whose Italian translation is approximately halfway between «hits the mark» and «hits the target».
Looks like we got a new can design thanks to the best player in baseball. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/L3kUHvdMTc
— Coors Light (@CoorsLight) August 29, 2023
Three days after Ohtani’s home run, a single post on Coors’ Twitter account garnered over 1.3 million views, compared to the few thousand other content typically gets. The public response was such as to convince Coors to continue with the initiative, again without directly suing either Ohtani or the MLB for contractual issues. On September 5, the company put a limited run of empty Coors Light cans on sale online at $17 each with the addition of the black square, “a commemorative replica inspired by one of baseball’s greatest superstars.”
The cans were sold out in less than a day, the campaign replicated the numbers generated online by the first post and the whole initiative is now described by specialized sites as a case study. But the story of that home run and the special cans of Coors Light probably won’t end that way. In fact, it is expected that many of those who were willing to buy them online will put them up for sale by taking advantage of the enormous North American sports collectibles market, of which baseball constitutes a large portion.
The value of memorabilia and cards are in fact subject to many variations which depend in particular on the performance and career results of the player to whom they are linked. Ohtani is still young for the long times of baseball and the market generated by his collectibles is still in its infancy. His career, however, seems destined for records and successes which over the years will most likely contribute to greatly increasing the value of everything that concerns him: certain stickers from the year in which he was elected best rookie of the championship are already valued among the 20 to 40 thousand dollars.
– Read also: The baseball player who won a game on LSD
2023-09-13 16:20:22
#history #baseball #marketing #collecting
