Alex Call is a backup outfielder making $1.6 million a year, and this week he did Major League Baseball’s job better than Major League Baseball did it.
The 32-year-old Dodgers outfielder called out the league directly on X, asking TBS, Fox, NBC and MLB to pull Novig’s Sydney Sweeney ads from the playoff broadcasts. He’s not a star with enough pull to force the league’s hand. Call is a Ball State guy the White Sox drafted a decade ago, a fourth outfielder who signed a one-year deal back in January and has spent the season doing exactly what fourth outfielders do: show up, fill a spot, stay out of the headlines.
I don’t have a kid, but I’ve spent enough Sundays cooking dinner with a game on and my mom’s sports radio bleeding in from the kitchen to know exactly the scene Call’s describing. A parent, a kid, a ballgame nobody thought twice about putting on. That’s the audience getting hit with a Sydney Sweeney ad timed like a jump scare.
Newsweek confirmed the specifics. Novig’s controversial “Just Sports” campaign puts Sweeney on screen partially unclothed, covering herself with sports equipment, selling a prediction-market app to the same playoff audience with a kid on the couch. Call said it without hedging, on X:
https://twitter.com/ACAD_27/status/2110269970575958189
A backup outfielder did MLB’s job for them, flagging a problem that TBS, Fox, NBC and the league’s own standards team apparently missed inside their own commercial breaks.
He wasn’t alone for long. Genevieve Albernaz, wife of Orioles manager Craig Albernaz, raised the identical complaint during ALCS broadcasts. British sprinter Amy Hunt called the campaign demeaning to female athletes, and Olympic water polo medalist Tilly Kearns said the same in her own words. Tennis player Priscilla Hon put it best on Instagram, writing that sport should teach kids their bodies are about what they can do, not how they look.
None of that stopped the ad from airing. The Novig ad ran during playoff broadcasts anyway, with Novig’s Sydney Sweeney commercial still running on MLB’s own feed after four people had said basically the same thing Call did, and nobody at the league office beat them to it. It kept showing up across League Championship Series broadcasts all week, the same TBS, Fox and NBC real estate carrying the Dodgers’ own NLCS push, supposedly screened before any of it reaches a national audience.
And these aren’t quiet broadcasts nobody’s watching. The Dodgers are the highest payroll left in the playoffs, the biggest draw left in the sport, which means more living rooms saw this ad than almost any other game on the schedule.
Call has no front office job, no vote on ad contracts, and no institutional authority of any kind. He’s a fourth outfielder on a one-year deal, and this exact outrage cycle will be forgotten by the time somebody throws the first pitch of the World Series.
But he caught something three broadcast partners and an entire league office apparently didn’t, and that should embarrass MLB a lot more than it embarrasses Novig.
