My Spin - The Origin of MLB.com

 

Great true story. 

My older brother Bob made a career as an office manager.

For 30 years he was the office manager of Morgan, Lewis Bacheus, with home offices at 101 Park Avenue.

Office Manager of a grade school in Fargo is one thing.

Office Manager of the 3rd largest law firm WORLDWIDE, with offices in 90 countries is, well, a little larger than that.

You may remember a post I wrote with an interview with the Manager of the NYC mail room of (what employees called) "Morgan Lewis" who was that guy that took that famous photo on October 15, 1969 of Ron Swoboda making that crazy catch in a World Series game. 

(Never asked why the dude named Bacheus wasn't referred to by the employees. Must be more to this...).

Anyway, one of the tasks given to Bob by the chief Lincoln lawyer was to build their first website.

No one knew shit about those things back in those days, but Bob knew he had to do two things. One, find someone that could build a site and, two, pick a name for said website. 

It wasn't the easiest thing in those days to find a geek but he did.

It was then on to the name which he decided to do the common thing. Take the first letter of the three names and add a .com.

So Bob filed for, and was granted...

MLB.com

Some time passed and Bob's office phone rang. It was someone that worked for the Commissioner's office down the block at 245 Park.

They said they had tried to apply for the MLB.com website but they told Bob's law firm had already secured it. The Morgan Lewis site was still being built so Bob thought it was no big deal to let baseball take it away from the law.

He did this gratis.

All this was the start of a long standing relationship between baseball and Morgan Lewis. They wound up the law firm that baseball used for antitrust issues which led to a recommendation to the NFL suits to use MLB also.

Err... sorry. Can't use that handle anymore.