Why the USPTO Told MLB It Can't Own 'Play Ball' — And What the Record Teaches Founders

The headline-grabbing fact is the calendar. Major League Baseball filed PLAY BALL (Serial No. 97227010) as a trademark for clothing on January 19, 2022. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — the federal agency that grants trademarks, usually called the USPTO — didn't issue its final rejection until June 27, 2026. That's four years and five months later. Techdirt, reporting the denial, called the delay "the most surprising part of all of this." The public record explains exactly where those years went, and it isn't the ordinary story of a swamped agency working through a pile.

A quick orientation before the timeline, because none of this assumes you file trademarks for a living. When you apply, an examining attorney at the USPTO reviews your application and can send back an "office action" — a formal letter listing problems that must be fixed before the mark can register. A first one is a "non-final" office action. If the examiner isn't satisfied by your response, the next can be a "final" refusal. Keep those two terms in mind; the whole PLAY BALL saga runs on them.

Here's the timeline the record shows. After the non-final office action went out on October 31, 2022, the application sat in a formal "suspension" — a pause the USPTO puts on a file, usually while it waits for something else to resolve. That pause generated no fewer than eight "REPORT COMPLETED SUSPENSION CHECK — CASE STILL SUSPENDED" events: May 2023, November 2023, three times in October 2024, April 2025, October 2025, plus two "suspension checked — to attorney for action" entries in October 2025 and May 2026. A suspension letter went out on November 17, 2022, barely two weeks after MLB's attorney answered the first office action.

So the file wasn't ignored. It was parked — reviewed again and again, left in place each time — until the examining attorney finally wrote the refusal this summer. The office wasn't asleep. It was waiting.

What the refusal actually says

Per Techdirt's reporting on the June filing, the USPTO grounded the denial in a specific rule: a "commonplace term, message, or expression widely used by a variety of sources" that "merely conveys an ordinary, familiar, well-recognized concept or sentiment" cannot be registered. Trademark examiners call this "informational matter" — wording the public reads as a general message, not as the name of one company's product.

That's a harder refusal to beat than the usual ones. Most trademark fights turn on likelihood of confusion (the concern that two brands are close enough that shoppers might mix them up) or on a mark being merely descriptive (it just describes the product, like "Cold" for ice cream). Informational matter is a different animal. The examiner isn't comparing PLAY BALL to some other company's mark. The examiner is saying the phrase belongs to everyone, so it can't point to anyone.

Our record confirms where the application stands. PLAY BALL carries a status the USPTO's own file describes as "FINAL REFUSAL – MAILED." The mark is still coded "Live" and "Pending," which is the register's way of saying MLB still has time to respond. The final refusal itself runs 91 pages. That is not a form letter. Ninety-one pages is an examiner building a wall of evidence.

The goods description reads like a department-store inventory: headwear, shirts, sweaters, vests, dresses, athletic uniforms, jerseys, underwear, sleepwear, swimwear, aprons, infant wear, cloth bibs, Halloween costumes — all filed in a single category. (Trademarks are sorted into numbered "classes" of goods and services; clothing is Class 025.)

The register was the evidence

Here is the part the news coverage points at but doesn't quantify. Across the full register, exact-match PLAY BALL filings break down to 11 abandoned, 5 cancelled, 2 expired, 1 pending, and 1 registered. Nineteen of twenty are dead. The single pending record is MLB's. The single living registration belongs to a Canadian food company for bubble gum in a food-products class (Reg. No. 3862563) — precisely the "food company for bubble gum" that trademark attorney Josh Gerben cited to explain how registrability depends on what you're selling. PLAY BALL on gum reads as a brand; PLAY BALL on a baseball jersey reads as a sentiment.

Now narrow to clothing. Class 025 is the most crowded category for the exact phrase, with five filings — and MLB's is the only one still alive. The other four tell the story:

• PLAY BALL by Z Media Inc. — for T-shirts, registered in 2013, later cancelled.
• PLAY BALL by Jeffrey Evans Nelson — a broad clothing list, registered in 1996, later cancelled.
• PLAY BALL by Brian F. Powers — clothing, filed 2018, abandoned.
• PLAY BALL by LetsPlay, Inc. — "baseball caps, T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts," filed 2003, abandoned.

Two companies actually secured PLAY BALL registrations for clothing before MLB ever tried. Both are now dead. The phrase has been reached for, granted, and let go in exactly the category MLB wants — a pattern that looks less like an available brand than like a phrase nobody could hold onto.

Zoom out and the "ubiquitous" label stops being an insult and starts being a fact. Searching the wording "play ball" for marks containing the phrase PLAY BALL returns 70 filings, spread across trading cards (Topps and Upper Deck both tried), games and sporting goods, gum, processed meats (a 1992 filing), even a soap-and-washcloth kit registered back in 1959. When an examiner needs to prove a phrase is "widely used by a variety of sources," this is the file that writes itself.

Why this was different from MLB's usual playbook

Techdirt frames the story as MLB overreaching again — the Brooklyn burger dispute, the Little League threats, the fight over the letter "W." Fair enough. What the register adds is why this refusal is so much harder to reverse than the confusion-based skirmishes MLB usually picks.

A likelihood-of-confusion refusal is about the other guy's mark, and there's room to argue: different customers, different sales channels, different products. An informational-matter refusal is about the public itself. The examiner isn't saying PLAY BALL clashes with an existing brand. The examiner is saying shoppers don't see PLAY BALL on a T-shirt as coming from any particular company — it's just the thing an umpire yells to start a game.

There's a theoretical escape hatch called "acquired distinctiveness" — proving that, through long and heavy use, the public has come to treat your everyday phrase as your brand specifically. But for a phrase this generic, the evidence you'd need is enormous. And 91 pages of "here's everyone else using it" is the examiner stacking the deck against that argument in advance.

MLB's remaining options are a request for reconsideration (asking the same examiner to change course) or an appeal to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board — the USPTO's in-house court that hears trademark disputes, often shortened to the TTAB. Neither is cheap, and the record offers MLB little ammunition. There's no surviving PLAY BALL clothing registration to point to as a precedent. The closest matches are all cancelled.

The practical read for founders

Two lessons travel well beyond baseball, and both protect your company's brand budget.

First, a suspension is not a reprieve. MLB's application survived eight suspension checks over roughly three and a half years before the refusal finally landed. If one of your own filings gets suspended while the USPTO waits on something else, the underlying problem doesn't fix itself in the meantime — and when the file comes back to the examiner, the refusal you were dreading is still sitting there. Treat a suspended application as live risk on your books, not as a matter that has quietly gone away.

Second, run the crowded-field check before you file, not after you get rejected. "Crowded field" simply means a lot of parties are already using the same or similar wording for the same kind of product — a strong signal the term is too common to own. A five-minute search of the exact phrase in the target category would have shown MLB two dead clothing registrations and zero living ones. That kind of screen is exactly what separates a filing worth making from a filing that earns a 91-page rejection and four years of paperwork. GleanMark exists to make that check fast.

MLB, for the record, is no beginner at this. The register shows Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. holds 404 total marks, 403 of them currently active — one of the largest sports-branding portfolios on file anywhere. This wasn't ignorance. It was, as the critics note, a swing at a phrase the office had already told the public it couldn't own.

You can run the same analysis MLB's situation demands: pull every exact and wording-level hit for a phrase, filter by product category, and look at the ratio of living to dead filings before you commit a dollar to it. When nineteen of twenty earlier filings are dead in your target category, the register is telling you something no marketing deck will. Reading that signal is a business skill — the cheap, early kind of due diligence that keeps your brand out of a four-year dead end.

This analysis is based on public USPTO records and is not legal advice.