Way Ahead of the Trend

Over a year ago, I posted an "Open Letter to MLB Network," asking the channel's executives to implement an idea I called Ducks On The Pond; essentially, a Red Zone Channel for baseball.  Amazingly, MLB Network listened and debuted an hour-long block called Solid 60 featuring "highlights, updates and live look-ins at games" as part of the network's MLB Tonight program. It was a small victory for Caught Looking and all fans of out-of-market baseball games, and I was happy with MLB Network for heeding my advice.

That is no excuse, however, for MLB Network to steal my intellectual property (please ignore the fact that the Caught Looking logo does, admittedly, slightly resemble that of Major League Baseball).  Recently, MLB Network has unveiled a new series of promotional sports for their live game coverage, where the network shows live baseball games in their entirety four nights a week.  What slogan has the MLB Network chosen to promote these games, you ask?  They went with "Get Caught Looking on MLB Network" - check out the video below for the proof.  The video was uploaded to MLB.com on April 29 of this year, still well after the debut of this blog in April on 2010, though I just noticed it on TV fairly recently.  After the Solid 60 debut, I could have believed that the MLB Network heads had independently come up with the same idea as me shortly after I posted about it.  Now that the channel has incorporated the name of this blog as the slogan for its live game programming, however?  I'm not so sure.

Incredibly, this isn't even the first time this year that a company has started using the "Caught Looking" slogan to promote baseball-related products.  You may recall that, in May, I posted about Victoria's Secret's line of PINK / MLB-branded merchandise featuring the "Caught Looking" tagline.  While the raunchy-ness of the first example of IP theft made me question my choice of blog name, this more recent offense actually makes me more confident than ever that "Caught Looking" was the right choice.  While stealing is always wrong (shame on you, MLB Network - I appreciate your readership, but next time please ask my permission before blatantly ripping off my blog title), if "Caught Looking" is good enough for what has quickly become one of my all-time favorite TV channels, it's certainly good enough for me.