Cruise curse? SF Giants' offense stalled since unveiling jersey patch
The SF Giants finally jumped on the jersey patch bandwagon two weeks ago, announcing a partnership with the self-driving car company Cruise. But since then, Cruise has had a disastrous string of stalled cars and traffic jams, and the Giants have scored 34 runs in 12 games, winning only four of them.
Officially, it's "an enhanced partnership to further serve local residents and businesses, accelerate the electrified transportation system and improve road safety and environmental sustainability throughout San Francisco."
Practically it means that the Giants put an ugly patch on the sleeve of their jerseys promoting a company owned by General Motors that makes driverless electric vehicles - ones that have just been unleashed on San Francisco streets, to poor results.
A week after the Giants partnership with Cruise was announced, the California Public Utilities Commission ruled that Cruise and their competitor Waymo (funded by Alphabet) could operate paid robo-taxi services in San Francisco 24 hours a day. This despite a "skyrocketing" number of incidents involving autonomous vehicles stalling, driving through Muni wires and caution tape, and plowing into emergency scenes and fire hoses.
Basically, the streets of San Francisco are the basepaths, and Cruise's taxis are Ruben Rivera.
A day after the massive expansion of robotic taxis was approved, countless Cruise vehicles were stalled all over the city, blocking streets in North Beach.
Cruise blamed "connectivity issues" for the massive jams last week, which is a phrase that Gabe Kapler might want to adopt after games like last Sunday, when Giants hitters struck out 17 times. It's not bad hitting! They're just having connectivity issues with the ball.
It also makes sense that the Giants would partner with a company that has trouble delivering when things are crowded. On a busy weekend evening, the streets of San Francisco are essentially a bases-loaded situation. And like Cruise, the Giants are terrible with the bases loaded, and have been for years.
Cruise also relies heavily on analytics to drive its cars' decision-making, which they also have in common with the Giants. And if that results in a catastrophic failure, both react with arrogance and insist they were right all along.
When a local reporter rode in a Cruise taxi, it abruptly stopped and drove into a median because it hit a construction zone, stalling for 20 minutes and blocking two lanes of traffic. The company insisted that "the better course... was to come to a safe stop rather than proceed."
Similarly, when Gabe Kapler was asked about pinch-hitting Austin Slater, mired in an 0-16 slump, with the bases loaded, he also got indignant about the question.
Slater hit into an inning-ending double play with the bases loaded.
However unsightly, and however questionable the sponsor, jersey patches are sadly here to stay. Almost no one notices or comments on the sponsorship of NBA jerseys any more, and soccer fans happily sport jerseys that show the sponsor's name bigger than the team's own crest.
But there's a danger in getting sponsorships from emerging companies. The Golden State Warriors and Miami Heat learned that when cryptocurrency exchange FTX was exposed as a massive fraud. At least the Warriors only had to take down some ads - the Heat had to rename their entire arena, and find someone to replace their $135 million sponsorship deal.
When Oracle Park opened as Pac Bell Park in 2000, it had a deal with online grocery company Webvan, who paid "in the low seven figures" to plaster its logo on every single cup holder in the park, as well as a few billboards. They were going to disrupt the grocery space, but instead the company went from being worth $8 billion at its IPO to worthless in 19 months.
By July of 2001, Webvan had lost $800 million and filed for bankruptcy - and the Giants had to wait for months to get clearance from their lawyers to scrape off over 42,000 stickers. Note to Cruise: Webvan relied on a lot of robots as well.
But perhaps even if its vehicles are unreliable public hazards, Cruise will find its niche among kinky San Franciscans.
That's the one area where Cruise is a bad fit as a sponsor. Because no one would associate the 2023 SF Giants with scoring.
