Josh Rawitch spent his first day working for the Dodgers scrambling to erase Mike Piazza from Los Angeles.
It was May 18 of 1998, a Monday. The previous Friday had brought one of the more infamous trades in Dodgers history. Without the knowledge of the Dodgers general manager, team ownership had engineered a seven-player trade to send Piazza – the 1993 National League Rookie of the Year, five-time Dodgers All-Star and face of the franchise – to the Marlins.
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Rawitch, now the Senior Vice President of Communications for the Diamondbacks, was 22 and fresh out of college. An internship in the Dodgers’ marketing department had turned into full-time employment, and he had to hit the ground running. Piazza’s image was not just everywhere around Dodger Stadium, it was all over L.A. All of that had to come down as soon as possible.
“That’s what we were doing,” Rawitch remembered, “trying to take a player who was an iconic, generational player – now a Hall of Famer – off of everything in Los Angeles.”
In the 20 years he’s spent in baseball, Rawitch hasn’t had many other days like that first one with the Dodgers. For one, Hall of Fame-type players don’t get traded very often, and certainly not in May. Perhaps the closest Rawitch has come was when the Diamondbacks traded former No. 1 overall Justin Upton after the 2012 season, and that was in the offseason. Most of the team’s advertisem*nts around Phoenix were coming down anyway.
But players do get traded, and their images are plastered all over the place. The Diamondbacks are unlikely to trade someone from their major-league team before Tuesday’s deadline – they’re in buy mode, meaning the public relations staff will be focused on marketing new players Eduardo Escobar and Matt Andriese – but the organization is ready just in case.
No team wants to leave an awkward reminder for fans of the beloved players now departed – or, in some cases, the player who never came in the first place. Three years ago, as the Suns were courting power forward LaMarcus Aldridge, Phoenix mayor Greg Stanton tweeted a mock-up of a 78-foot-tall banner set to be unfurled in downtown the next day. It featured Aldridge in a Suns jersey, along with the hashtag #BringOnLA. Aldridge signed with the Spurs the next day, and the banner never saw the light of day.
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“You do know that if you make a mistake, it’s compounded by the fact that social media can make you look foolish pretty quickly if you don’t catch it,” Rawitch said. “I think we’ve all kind of accepted that. We know it’s probably a short life cycle.”
Still, the Diamondbacks made a concerted effort to refresh their marketing materials after any roster move, especially a trade. The team probably already has scrubbed Chase Field of any traces of reliever Randall Delgado, who was designated for assignment earlier in the week to make room for Andriese.
They don’t get much of a heads up. Teams try to fiercely protect information about any ongoing trade discussions, and the current Diamondbacks front office is particularly tight-lipped. Talks may last weeks and word of them may only leak at the 11th hour, but even then, nothing is assured. The front office only passes the word along to the public relations staff, for the purposes of writing up a press release and other materials, when discussions are on the goal line.
“Nobody wants to see their name out there, especially if it doesn’t happen,” said Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen. “We try to be respectful of that. That’s why we try to keep it close to the vest.”
When a trade does become official, the gears of the Diamondbacks marketing machine begin turning. Unlike in Rawitch’s early Dodger days, the Diamondbacks’ in-house graphic design group – called Clubhouse Creative – keeps a master list of anywhere a player’s image appears in any team marketing materials, in the stadium or outside of it. Players like Paul Goldschmidt appear in hundreds of places. Others – like Delgado, a middle reliever – may show up only in a handful of instances. They are on “player cases” that adorn the pillars that line the concourses of the stadium, on framed photographs all over the team offices and the club level, on light pole banners for blocks around Chase Field and an in a multitude of other places.
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In the hours after a trade is completed, six or seven employees from various departments walk the stadium to hunt down images of any player no longer with the team. For marketing materials that are more than a one-person job – like the player cases and light pole banners, or any billboards the team may have around town – the team deals with outside companies to make changes. Digital materials are also altered, like re-cutting highlight videos played before first pitch to excite the crowd.
“The people who are really heavily involved in this know this building inside and out,” Rawitch said. “They know where every player case is. Even if they may not necessarily know who is on every one and they want to make sure they don’t miss anything, it’s not like they’re lifting up seats to figure it out. They know every nook and cranny of the building.”
The Diamondbacks try to make it easier on themselves on the front end. When they can, they center their marketing materials around players most likely to stick around. Rawitch presumably has no worries about tracking down every image of Goldschmidt, for example. As a popular and talented bullpen piece making near the league minimum, Archie Bradley probably isn’t going anywhere, either. The Diamondbacks also tend to favor digital billboards when possible, as they can be easily changed. Also, unlike some other teams, they don’t wrap their stadium with 100-foot images of their stars.
Still, there are no guarantees. Had the Diamondbacks disappointed this year and decided to trade impending free agents A.J. Pollock and Patrick Corbin, there would have been an extensive redecoration. It hasn’t affected the Diamondbacks, but sometimes a trade knocks the legs out from under a planned promotion. When Yoenis Céspedes was traded to the Red Sox in 2014, the Athletics still gave away a Céspedes-themed shirt at a game just two days after the deadline. Other teams have scrapped them altogether.
“Organizations have gotten very good at adjusting on the fly,” Rawitch said. “In this day and age, you have to be ready to make a change for any given reason. It’s not just big trades that test front offices. It’s any time there’s a move. Baseball doesn’t have any breaks.”
Removing a player from the team’s marketing material does not mean acting like he never existed, of course. Even as baseball’s youngest team, the Diamondbacks cherish their history. The hallway to the home clubhouse is lined with plaques listing Arizona’s Opening Day lineups and All-Star selections for all 20 years of the franchise’s existence. Any player who has garnered any kind of award, or lent his name to one of the many Little League fields the organization has built across the state, still is remembered somewhere in Chase Field.
“It’s not like we’re trying to wipe someone’s history clean,” Rawitch said.
(Top photos: Zach Buchanan)
