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| ESPN’s Mark Reilly (left) and Mark Quenzel, IRL’s Tony George, ABC’s Loren Matthews, IRL’s Ken Ungar |
Many of the country’s best high school baseball players no longer have to see their crowning achievement relegated to a few fleeting seconds in cyberspace.
For the second consecutive year, the All-American Baseball Game will bring together 30 elite high school seniors for an event designed to celebrate and expose these traditionally faceless stars. This year’s game will take place in Albuquerque, N.M., on June 7, the first day of the MLB amateur draft, and will be broadcast live on Fox Sports Net Arizona and on at least nine other FSN regional networks.
“We thought there was more we could do to let Major League Baseball fans watch their first-round picks for the first time,” said Rich McGuinness, president and founder of SportsLink Inc., the New Jersey-based sports marketing firm that manages and produces the event. SportsLink also produces the 5-year-old U.S. Army All-American Bowl featuring the country’s top high school football prospects.
Like the All-American Bowl, the All-American Baseball Game is the culmination of a nationwide celebration. Throughout April and May, SportsLink’s staff traveled to 35 cities to honor baseball’s top amateur prospects, as voted by SportsLink and Perfect Game, a scouting service. A week of skills contests, awards dinners and other celebratory events precedes the game.
Nike, 989 Sports, PlayStation 2, Real Turf, Perfect Game, Quickswing, Wyndham Albuquerque Hotel, Hero’s Salute Award Co. and Advantage Rent-A-Car signed on as sponsors of the two-month program, which allows each company to showcase its products to thousands of high school students. Each sponsorship is valued at between $40,000 and $50,000, McGuinness said.
Real Turf, Quickswing and the Wyndham are new sponsors this year; the others are returning from last year. Last year’s inaugural game was played a week after the draft at Yogi Berra Stadium in Montclair, N.J., and was broadcast by FSN New York.
SportsLink is paying for the production of the telecast and the airtime, and SportsLink and FSN Arizona each control and sell 50 percent of the ad inventory. SportsLink is cutting deals with other FSN regional channels to pick up the game live or on tape delay. FSN executives said 10 regional channels had made deals to broadcast the game, five of them live, and McGuinness said he expects to have five more signed on before the game.
The program’s nine sponsors all have television buys in their sponsorship packages.
SportsLink encourages players whose draft status has been determined by game time to wear the caps of their new clubs.
Major League Baseball does not sanction the game. MLB executives are concerned clubs would not want to put new draftees at risk of injury and that both agents and clubs would not want to risk affecting a draftee’s bargaining power, according to Tom Brasuell, MLB’s vice president of community affairs.
So far, no such issues have arisen for SportsLink, which has commitments from at least 30 of the 35 players selected. The only questions involve players whose teams might still be in the playoffs on June 7.
Jeff Kahn, a Mobile, Ala.-based agent who last year advised New York Mets first-round pick and game participant Lastings Milledge and is advising two participants in this year’s game, said these issues would not keep one of his players out of the game. Kahn said he expected a couple of players, likely pitchers, would be recommended by their new MLB clubs not to play, but most players get the go-ahead.
Unlike the NFL and NBA drafts, the MLB amateur draft is covered exclusively online, by mlb.com, which provides live video from a studio set at MLB Advanced Media headquarters and live audio coverage via MLB.com Radio.
