Dale Murphy Backs His Son as Alex Call Asks MLB to Drop the Risque Playoff Ads

The biggest argument of this postseason has nothing to do with a pitch. Taylor Murphy sat down to watch playoff baseball with his children on Monday and posted the running order of the commercial breaks instead: Megan Fox selling erectile dysfunction pills in a red bodysuit, the scariest horror trailer he had seen, and Sydney Sweeney in minimal clothing promoting a sports prediction platform, the New York Post reports. By Wednesday the post had collected his father, a two-time MVP, and a current Dodgers outfielder.

What did Taylor Murphy actually complain about?

The breaks, not the baseball. Murphy asked MLB, in his words, whether it wants more kids watching, and suggested it start with the commercials, the New York Post reports. His closing point was about control of the room: a parent should be able to leave a playoff game on in the house without working the remote through every pitching change. It is the same family-viewing argument the league itself makes when it markets October, which is why a complaint about a postseason already full of arguments about the product on the field travelled so fast once it moved to the product around it.

Why did Dale Murphy’s reply change the story?

Because the complaint stopped being anonymous. Dale Murphy posted on Wednesday that he agreed with his son, the New York Post reports. Murphy won two National League MVP awards, made seven All-Star teams and had his No. 3 retired by Atlanta. When a player from that era of the sport questions what baseball is selling between innings, the league’s own history is doing the asking. The Murphys are also a neat cross-section of the audience MLB says it wants: a grandfather who played, a father watching now, and children the sport is trying to keep.

What did Alex Call add to it?

A player’s voice, aimed at the networks by name. The Dodgers outfielder, who is not on the club’s postseason roster, quoted Taylor Murphy’s post on Wednesday and asked TBS, Fox, NBC and MLB to take the ads off playoff broadcasts, ClutchPoints reports. He framed it as a father rather than a player, writing that his son wants to watch baseball with him. Several Dodgers teammates reposted the message, the New York Post reports, which matters for a club in the middle of a series that has already put its manager’s decisions under a microscope: the complaint now has clubhouse reach, not just fan reach.

Who actually sells the ads in a playoff broadcast?

Mostly not MLB, and that is where the argument gets stuck. Broadcast partners and advertisers sell and place most of the commercial time in postseason games, Particle News notes, so the office the complaints are addressed to does not hold the inventory being complained about. Novig, whose Sweeney campaign sits at the centre of the row, has defended it through chief executive Jacob Fortinsky, and the campaign had already been criticised by swimmer Ariarne Titmus and sprinter Amy Hunt after its September launch, EssentiallySports reports. The league has spent years chasing younger viewers, to the point of proposing that top seeds choose their playoff opponents, but the breaks in its biggest games are sold to the highest bidder in a different market.

What is the counter-argument?

That the outrage is selective. Some users answering the Murphys asked why revealing clothing in the breaks is the problem when the product in the most criticised break is gambling, the New York Post reports. Sweeney’s own defence of the campaign has pointed at athletes who posed nude for ESPN’s Body Issue. Neither line answers the parents’ narrower point, which is about timing rather than morality: whatever adults may buy, a family broadcast in the early evening is a shared screen. How that squares with a league that benches its own captain for a playoff game and calls it strategy is a separate debate, but the ads argument is now running on its own.

What happens next?

Watch the World Series breaks. MLB had not publicly responded in the reporting available when this article was published, and neither had the networks. The practical test is not a statement but an inventory change: whether the Novig spot and the Ro Sparks ad keep their rotation when the audience gets bigger and younger at the end of the month. Until then, the scoreboard on this one reads fans 3, league office 0, with the networks holding the remote everyone is arguing about.