Phillies have trademarked ‘Bedlam at the Bank’

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Howard Smith has been a Phillies fan for more than half a century. And like most longtime devotees of the team, he felt the hair on his arms stand on end when radio announcer Scott Franzke called Bryce Harper’s go-ahead home run in the pennant-clinching game of last year’s National League Championship Series against the San Diego Padres.

You know the call. It’s seared into your mind. Swing and a drive ... left field ... it’s deep ... it’s going ... and it is gone! It is bedlam at the Bank, as Bryce Harper has put the Phillies on top!

“I had such a visceral reaction to it,” Smith said by phone Saturday. “I thought it was one of the best baseball calls I’ve ever heard.”

Smith thought something else, too. Entering his fifth full season as the Phillies president of business affairs, he suggested that the team trademark “Bedlam at the Bank.” The Phillies filed a request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and this month, they gained exclusive rights to Franzke’s turn of phrase.

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It was a logical step, according to Smith, after the Phillies used “Bedlam at the Bank” as the title for their 2022 video yearbook. By obtaining the trademark, they can protect “Bedlam at the Bank” from being used for profit by outside parties. Smith said the Phillies will be selling T-shirts and other licensed merchandise bearing the four-word slogan once the season begins.

“Philly is such an aggressive market that, when something gets hot, it’s like a cottage industry. You’ll see it all over the place,” said Smith, who joined the Phillies in 2017 after working as MLB’s senior vice president of licensing. “I said, ‘This is something, from an organizational perspective, that’s pretty cool. It’s one of the best calls of our time.’ To me, it was pretty simple. We decided, let’s trademark it, and let’s introduce product this year.”

Smith said that trademarking organizational property is “more common than you think” among MLB and other professional sports teams. The Phillies, in fact, have trademarked various logos, Phanavision, and even the Phillie Phanatic.

But it’s unusual for a team to trademark a play-by-play call from its radio or television broadcast, according to Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney who tracks “interesting filings” with the USPTO on his blog. Gerben noted that “it’s rare to have a historic moment where the call by the announcer is also historic.”

Indeed, while Franzke’s call would have been memorable in any circumstance, Smith contended that the situation — eighth inning of Game 5 of the NLCS, with the Phillies trailing by one run and down to their last six outs — made it iconic.

“It’s all about the moment,” Smith said. “If Scott had said that in the middle of July, people would’ve said, ‘Oh, how creative is that,’ and we’d move on. But it happened at such an important time during the postseason and the ballpark was crazy. Everything was crazy. It was just perfect timing.”

Smith said he spoke to Franzke the day after Harper’s homer. He had many of the same questions that Franzke has heard from fans.

“How’d you come up with that?” Smith said. “Was that in your back pocket?”

Franzke, who recently said to MLB.com that he finds it “humbling” that people were so fond of the call, told Smith what he tells everyone. It wasn’t pre-planned. The words came to him in the moment.

Smith discussed the trademarking idea with the Phillies’ lawyers in the days after the game. But the actual process took several months, according to Smith. First, the Phillies needed to make sure that nobody else owned the phrase. The team also began putting it to use.

“If you don’t use it,” Smith said, “you lose it.”

In the interim, unlicensed T-shirts were produced with “Bedlam at the Bank” plastered across the chest. Several Phillies players, including slugger Kyle Schwarber, have even worn them around the clubhouse in spring training.

“We’re not going to treat it like the Phillies ‘P’ or the wordmark, but if we want to continue to own it, we’re going to have to be a little bit more diligent in protecting it,” Smith said. “We’re a social institution. Getting in a fight with a screen printer over a T-shirt, it never goes well. But now, we need to just treat it accordingly.”

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