Opening Day in Baseball

I love opening day. The first game might have been last night, but the baseball season starts today. Opening day is great, not only because it signals the beginning of a new baseball season, where anything can happen, but because it officially marks the beginning of spring and summer. Warm weather, green grass and swimming pools await, while snow shovels, ice and heavy winter coats can be put away until next year. For more on Opening Day, see this post from last year.

Hopefully, too, Opening Day can take some of the spotlight off of baseball's legal problems. Alex Sanchez has become the first player suspended under the new steroid policy (ESPN, 4/4), which will hopefully encourage others to leave the juice behind. At the very least, it proves that baseball intends to enforce its policy. Now, it remains to be seen how the new policy affects player statistics, if at all.

Even the phrase "opening day" cannot escape litigation. In January, a federal court ruled that Major League Baseball did not infringe the trademark of Opening Day Productions, Inc., through its use of the phrase. Although the company claimed to have registered the phrase as a trademark and had discussions with baseball in the early 1990s about a marketing campaign centering on "opening day", the talks never came to fruition and the company had never made more than sporadic use of the slogan. The court observed that the right to a particular trademark grows out of its use, and the use must be deliberate and continuous, not sporadic or transitory. Thus, the company's use of the phrase is not protectable under trademark law. (MLB Properties v. Opening Day Prod., 2005 WL 53260 (S.D.N.Y. 2005)).

For more baseball litigation, check out this list of Baseball's Looniest Lawsuits.

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