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Most Implicated Baseball Players Not Active Endorsers

  • Ad Age, Monday, December 17, 2007 11:45 AM

Although a large number of baseball players were implicated last week in former Sen. George Mitchell's 409-page tome detailing baseball's "steroids era," the vast majority of them are not active endorsers for product marketers.

"If the report had named the young guns who were the future of the game, it would have been a huge problem," says Wally Hayward, CEO of Relay Worldwide, a sports and sponsorship agency based in Chicago. The fact that it didn't "means this will all be just a big mark on a time period that's in the past," according to Hayward.

When asked about the report, the sport's biggest sponsors all but yawned. "We're committed to Major League Baseball and applaud its efforts to address the situation," says a spokesman for State Farm. Baseball's biggest sponsor, General Motors, remains in talks to renew a sponsorship deal that expired last season. "The Mitchell Report does not really have an impact on our talks," a GM spokeswoman says.

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