The A's and ad agency Hub Strategy on Friday launched the fifth season of their award-winning "Green Collar Baseball" marketing campaign. It is a fully integrated program, featuring television commercials as well as print, outdoor and digital ads. The team's marketing slogan, "Green Collar Baseball," again will be integrated throughout the campaign (A's). In San Jose, John Hickey noted the campaign includes eight commercials total, and A's 1B Brandon Moss "was flat-out hilarious in his spots, although some of the best bits, seen in outtakes and bloopers, may be left on the cutting room floor." Moss appeared in "two bits, one where he chatters to runners at first base to distract them during pickoff throws and the other in which he crashes a group of his teammates doing 'I've got a secret' and veers the conversation from baseball secrets to improvised personal ones." If the bits "survive the editing process, a star will be born." Other ads include 3B Josh Donaldson and the tarp he "vaulted over to make a highlight-reel catch last year enter therapy," coaches Curt Young and Mike Gallego "go back a quarter-century to a different time, including doing a selfie with a Polaroid camera," and the A's Home Run Tunnel "gains some new uses, including getting Derek Norris into his catching gear, getting [P] Jarrod Parker mustard and ketchup on his hot dog and blow-drying" P Sean Doolittle's beard (SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, 3/16).
STIRRING THE POT: In S.F., Scott Ostler names A's co-Owners John Fisher and Lew Wolff his "knuckleheads of the week." The duo "floated the threat that if they don't get a favorable lease extension from Oakland, they just might move their A's to a temporary ballpark in San Jose." That is "just what the Athletics and their fans need from ownership: more posturing, silliness and delay, while the owners rake in profits and pretend to care" (S.F. CHRONICLE, 3/16).
