"Wherever he is, Bart (Giamatti) is spinning. It's a good thing he's not around." -- former commissioner Fay Vincent on Major League Baseball’s decision to allow advertising for the movie Spider-Man 2 atop its bases during a 15-stadium, $3.6 million promotion that will run during interleague play from June 11-13.

Current commissioner Bud Selig was recently hailed by baseball historian and political guru George Will as the greatest commissioner in baseball history. If numbers tell the whole story, Will’s argument is a valid one. This season alone, despite the steroid controversy and the perception that the sport is only about the Yankees, Red Sox, and, er, Yankees, attendance was up a whopping 15 percent in April, it’s highest level in more than a decade. MLB’s television contract rights top $3 billion from FOX and ESPN combined, a record high.

If those two important economic factors for the sport are any indication, Selig is indeed the man.

Just don’t tell that to the game’s purists like Vincent, especially when talking about baseball’s latest marketing ploy to put a few more coins in the coffer. 

"I guess it's inevitable, but it's sad," said the 65-year-old Vincent, who ironically is also the former president of Columbia Pictures, which is releasing the Spider sequel. "I'm old-fashioned. I'm a romanticist. I think the bases should be protected from this. I feel the same way I do when I see jockeys wears ads: Maybe this is progress, but there's something in me that regrets it very much."

Horse racing jockeys wearing sponsors’ patches as if they were race car drivers is another example of sports' pursuit of additional profits.

For professional boxers, it is no longer uncommon to showcase stenciled advertisements on their entire backs (what boxing fan doesn’t know what “GoldenPalace.com” is by now).  Some fighters were paid $100,000 for the ink before throwing a punch. 

NHL rinks, on the ice and along the boards, are one long string of sponsors.

Tiger Woods is a walking promo for Nike.

College football seemed to start the trend of sponsor-heavy events. There was once a time when the Sugar Bowl wasn’t called “The Nokia Sugar Bowl” and the Orange Bowl wasn’t referred to as the bulky “Federal Express Orange Bowl.” My personal favorite is long gone, however. When the University of Maryland qualified for a bowl game my sophomore year, I had the honor of telling my old high school buddies attending other schools that the Terps were going to kick butt in the venerable “Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl.”

If any sport other than baseball had worked a Spider-Man logo on to its field of play, the news would barely be newsworthy. But since baseball is still seen as an innocent and sacred institution, the move to place an advertisement anywhere on its hallowed field of dreams is overwhelmingly viewed by purists and fans alike as going too far, at least if flash polls are any indication. The tradition of the game can't be matched by the NBA, NHL or even the NFL.

You can install lights at Wrigley Field or mount $100 seats atop the Green Monster, but when placing a comic book character on first, second and third base, the public cries foul.

The forgotten question surrounding this controversy is just how effective these base-ads will be? MLB’s chief operating officer Bob DuPuy claims the strategy will help the league reach out to its younger fan base. But for fans actually at the game, young and old, it will be all but impossible to see the Spider-Man 2 logos, which will be 4-by-4 inches.

Instead, baseball appears to be stealing a page from Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ playbook: Bad publicity is better than no publicity. In this case, publicity and the predictable debate that follows will help marketers achieve their ultimate objective: Free advertising via the media.

Will the Spidey bases even be noticed by anyone in the ballpark outside of the second baseman and shortstop?

Probably not.

But will millions read about it? Debate its merits?

Most importantly, who won’t know that the makers of Spider-Man have a sequel coming out this summer?

If it wasn’t known to most of the public, it is now.

Maybe Commissioner Selig is on to something, even if he is selling out the national pastime in the process.

Somewhere, Bart Giamatti is spinning, and it’s not a spider web.

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