Lindbergh: The website that MLB couldn’t buy
From SABR member Ben Lindbergh at Grantland on August 27, 2015:
Aesthetically speaking, Twins.com is one of the world’s least-interesting websites. It doesn’t take long to load, but that’s only because there’s nothing to see.
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But what Twins.com lacks in looks, it makes up in location: While the website itself is as worthless as it seems, the virtual real estate it occupies isn’t. Those few lines of text are like a dingy bodega blocking the path of a Manhattan high-rise developer: a bull’s-eye for the wrecking ball. For years, Twins.com has been coveted by Major League Baseball, a company with billions of dollars at its disposal, as the would-be homepage of the league’s Minnesota team. And for years, MLB has been unable to buy it, because of brotherly love.
Twins.com’s strange story starts in 1994, a bad year for baseball. Mostly, it was bad because of the strike. But in retrospect, it was also bad because Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, a Philadelphia-based law firm, beat MLB to the punch by registering MLB.com. In 1994, no one knew that URLs mattered: It took until 1998 for MLB to create its own site, majorleaguebaseball.com, which took much longer to type than MLB.com.
Read the full article here: http://grantland.com/features/the-website-mlb-couldnt-buy/
- Related link: Read about the long legal saga behind the acquisition of MLB.com (Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2010)
Originally published: August 27, 2015. Last Updated: August 27, 2015.