The Website MLB Couldn’t Buy | Hacker News Reader

The Website MLB Couldn’t Buy

grantland.com

49 pointsmatthewowen17 comments

Love that they're Twins fans. What a funny coincidence.

I liked the humour tucked into the article

> ... Seattle, it seems, takes its URLs seriously ...

and

> ... replaced by an “Under Construction” sign and no fewer than four GIFs of jackhammers and excavators. Clearly, some serious site building was under way.

Things like that keep me interested in an otherwise (too) long article.

I actually sold a team domain to MLB. They didn't approach through Cahn (and the fact that his name appears is a PR coup for him) but through a corporate registrar iirc was CSC who does some name recovery for big brands.

Which one?

Wish I could say but probably not a good idea to give out that info. It was an East Coast team though.

Nowhere did they mention http://www.baseball.com/, the website I would have guessed was referred to by the title before I read the article.

I lost interest half way through. It seems strange to me to hold on to a domain name when someone is offering almost 1mil for it.

I'm sure the owner is thinking the MLB makes billions, a couple more mil wouldn't hurt them.

It really seems like they have no interest in selling it at all. It's more of a personal attachment that they identify with that domain name.

If you don't need money there's not really any reason to sell something for it.

I guess the "not needing money" part is something I've never experienced.

I deal in this industry. It's not always about needing the money or not needing it. It about gambling that the that offer of 1 million actually could be 2 million. You'd be surprised at how even ordinary people think when they get wind that they have something valuable.

Fun Fact: I bought a domain name for a reasonable price off a patent troll company. Was actually one of the easier and most surprising transactions I ever did.

These guys down sound like squatters. They just have had the domain their entire lives and don't really care to sell it.

I thought it would be about mlb.com, which I remember Major League Baseball not owning for many years.

I guess this is a recurring problem for them. Not sure why.

The article somewhat goes into that. They were late to get online. Luckily they were able to get the mlb.com domain for free from Morgan Lewis. They didn't start to get team domains until 2000. Luckily MLBAM has been leading the way technology wise for quiet a few years. They've been so successful that they have partnered with WWE, PGA, and NHL.

The whole operation to secure team domains has been so stealth I learned in that article that MLBAM was able to finally secure my favorite team's domain earlier this year, Rangers.com. All the ads at the ballpark still refer to their old domain, texasrangers.com.

The owner of baseball.com, Relfex Publishing, has come often while I was searching for a good domain name.

They have quite a few domains like this and they aren't interested in selling at all. And as frustrating as that is, it is much better than other squatters in the space who try to treat the domains they have as farmland to be worked and leased off to companies for temporary use. Its the system we have, and it is what it is. In a lot of ways it is disappointing how closely it mirrors physical land use and ownership.

The one I immediately think of is steam.com. These situations aren't going to change until whoever is making the decision dies.

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