So much better than math class!
As a female, I’m used to hearing the reasons why I’m not qualified to talk/enjoy/think about sports. I’m also familiar with all the cringe-worthy marketing ploys aimed at women. (If I see one more pink jersey I’m going to scream.) Thanks to Lefty, I came across CBSSports’ Baseball Boyfriend, a fantasy baseball companion app, presumably marketed to your younger sister.
After taking a look at the screengrabs for this thing, the first things I notice are hearts and kitten doodles. I’m twenty freaking five years old, I don’t doodle in the margins of my papers. I can only assume there’s a feature where you can play MASH (marry A-Rod, live in a shack with 47 kids and drive a mustang!!) and practice signing your first name with your BBBF(!)’s last. Moving on from the mind boggling design of BBBF, let’s take a look at the concept itself. Actually, it doesn’t sound all that terrible. You basically have one player teams and you can draft, or drop a player whenever you like. The goal is to accumulate the most points by the end of the season. It’s kind of like fantasy baseball for beginners. The problem, like in most other gender specific sports marketing, isn’t the concept, it’s the piss poor execution. Instead of drafting a player, you “date” him. Because girls only watch sports to check out cute guys, right? Once you choose a player, you can date him for as long or as short as you want. If you aren’t looking for a long term commitment, great! Feel free to slut it up with all of Major League Baseball. Be careful though, if you don’t kick your one night stand to the curb before noon, you’re stuck walk of shaming it with him in the same dress you wore last night. And girl, I don’t care how drunk people are, Waffle House is still a place of judgement. The thing that surprises me the most about <3 Baseball Boyfriend <3? It costs $2.99! Um, I’m sorry. I’m not going to fork over my hard earned cash for you to patronize me. I get enough of that for free from networks that think women need their own gender specific websites to read about sports news, or baseball teams that have “ladies training camp” where men can send their poor idiot girlfriends to learn the basics. Hell, enough people have a problem with women talking sports that ESPN had an entire complaint category about it on their website. What’s it gonna take for people to realize that female sports fans don’t need, nor do they want, to be separated from the men? If I weren’t a baseball fan, Baseball Boyfriend wouldn’t get me to be. I love baseball more than possibly any other thing on this planet except my family and my dogs, and all that app has done is make me kind of hate CBS. Pretty sure that’s not what they set out to do.
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