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The laundry detergent that explains baseball’s labor strife
One thing I didn’t know before moving to New York was that most of the city’s apartments lack the kind of basic household appliances suburbanites take for granted.
Like a washer and dryer. I didn’t have one my first eight years here. I had to trek four or five blocks to a laundromat every few weeks. The indignities. Lugging a canvas sack bursting with dirty clothes. Those little boxes of single-use detergent. That communal cart to shuffle around wet clothes. Ugh.
I have one now. It’s four feet from my desk. I could be doing laundry as we speak.
I’m not. I haven’t felt like it lately, after learning how weak my wash game is. We’re Tide people, you see. I thought that was top-of-the-line stuff. Then I learned about Renegade Sweat X Max Odor Defense with NANOVASIVE™ technology.
It feels stupid to wash my clothes when I know that my detergent isn’t working the fabric at a molecular level.
Now, I have not taken so much as a single free coffee since I started this newsletter. I’ve never run an ad. (Which is why you should upgrade!!! !!!!!!). But I will ditch all my morals for some free Renegade. I will work it seamlessly into every story going forward.
Just one 55-gallon drum, please. By my loose calculation, that will last me 22 years. Unlike, say, a college football team, which can plow through one of those in a month.
It adds up. But this story is not about profligate spending at public universities. I think the costs are entirely legitimate. Clothes need to be washed. Uniforms, in our OLED TV era, need to gleam.
No, my issue is that these schools’ detergent purchases are unwittingly abetting baseball’s current labor strife.
Because Renegade Sweat X with NANOVASIVE™ technology is partially why MLB owners want to implement a salary cap.
Renegade is one of the leading laundry detergent brands for professional and college sports. According to a promo video, over 200 different teams use its products. But its website copy doesn’t read like Scrubbing Bubbles. Instead, it calls itself a “disrupter in the industry.” One that’s “transforming laundry.”
That’s the kind of language you’d see in the pitch deck of a Silicon Valley startup applying for Y Combinator. Or… for a tech incubator created by the global capital consortium that owns the Los Angeles Dodgers.
In 2014, the Dodgers partnered with advertising agency R/GA to launch an incubator for startups operating at the intersection of technology and sports. The team expanded the project a few years later, launching Global Sports Venture Studios, designed to “forge strategic collaborations with emerging startups"
The ventures out of R/GA are the kind of superfluous startups that could only be conjured up by a misanthropic coder convinced ChatGPT can see the future. We’re talking reimagining dog food using cricket protein. Pay-as-you-fly insurance for drones. I ain’t making those up.
The names are as enervating as possible. We’ve got Awair, Clarifai, Cloq, Flotify, Goodr, Kadence, Kwit, Perksy, Qiibee, Smartzer, Smilo.
Guess: Which one provides nanocredit loans to low-income households and which is the first-ever loyalty program for the blockchain?
Cloq is the nanocredit company; Qiibee the blockchain loyalty program.
The venture also has 47 pet-focused startups. There’s Barkibu, Dogly, Dogo, Jiminy (that’s the cricket food), Mella, Pebbo, PetHub, SniffSpot, and Tobi.
SniffSpot is an Airbnb-style platform that lets people rent out their backyard to dog owners who want to let their dogs off leash for an hour. It has raised $12 million! I do not understand the current American economy!
(If you pay for FOIAball, I’ll never have to.)
Anyway, we are getting off topic. We are here to talk about laundry detergent.
I know what you are wondering, after all that tech talk. You’re wondering if this laundry detergent is leveraging cloud-based solutions to provide real-time laundry analytics and insights.
It is! Just look at this graphic.
Oh. You’re wondering if it works good? I don’t know. They haven’t sent me any yet.
I guess, since FOIAball is ostensibly a public records newsletter, we should probably talk about public records.
Last year, Oklahoma’s athletics department spent $34,369 with Renegade. Ole Miss spent even more: $43,126.
Other schools spent less. Wisconsin’s tab was $12,348. Texas Tech’s bill was $16,889. Northern Illinois spent $19,000. What accounts for the big discrepancies? I don’t know. Is this too much to spend on detergent? I don’t think so? I’ve never seen a dirty uniform to start a game, so works for me.
What do you need to launder clothes for an entire football team? A typical order from Renegade consists of a 55-gallon drum of Nano X detergent, which we talked about already. It’s $1,970 a pop. That sounds pricey, but it’s not that much more expensive than what I now consider normal crap. A 55-gallon drum of Tide is $1,800. (Update: JK, that link is for a 55-liter drum of Tide. Which is only 15 gallons. I can’t read, apologies.)
Alongside that, you’re gonna need five gallons of NanoX Stain Remover “to thoroughly lift and remove extra stubborn stains without damaging fabrics.” Then there’s 25 pounds of Action Powder, which “enhances the stain-fighting properties of Nano X to target protein-based stains and soils.” And 12 bottles of Ultra Active Pre-spotter, whose “unique formulation solubilizes stubborn stains and prevents redeposition.”
Dope. All that will run about $3,500. Go through that in a month, and you can see how schools hit those totals.
Which is… money that’s going back to the Dodgers! Back in 2016, after Renegade participated in the incubator, the company closed a $5 million funding round that the team invested in.
I have no idea how much that has returned. Could they have afforded Ohtani without NANOVASIVE™ technology? I think we know the answer.
Whatever it is, it’s not nothing. And the companies that have gone through its incubator just give the already wealthy Dodgers another revenue stream. It’s not the main reason they’re able to outspend the rest of the league. But it doesn’t hurt.
And it’s why 29 other owners are fuming right now, demanding a hard cap. So if there is a lockout next year, you can direct your ire at… those 29 cheapskate owners who don’t want to pay players.
LAUNDRY DETERGENT INNOCENT!
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