They lost.

Not this time, of course. They gave Major League Baseball the business for making a money grab, and plans to promote the new Spider-Man 2 movie with a webbed logo on the bases have been nixed.

At first glance, it would seem Bud Selig and MLB responded to the groundswell of fan disapproval that began almost immediately when reports of baseball’s deal with Columbia Tri-Star surfaced.

Leading the charge for the fans were former commissioner Fay Vincent and old-time baseball columnists, who used words such as “sad” and “embarrassing” to express their disappointment.

But the sanctimonious seamheads weren’t the only ones who balked at the idea. It didn’t go over well with many players, and the New York Yankees refused to even go along with it. Leave it to Bud to make the Yankees look like they’re the ones with the best interests of the game at heart.

You didn’t have to be a purist to believe that MLB had crossed the line on this one. I think it was a pretty silly promotion myself, and I want the National League to adopt the DH.

But you would have to be naive, and unfortunately, that’s what some baseball purists are, to think that anything has really been changed by this crusade.

The tide of commercialism in baseball isn’t just rising, it’s already flooded the basement, fried the wiring, rotted the furniture and cracked the foundation. It’s time to salvage what you can or move on. Wait for the game to return to the 1950s and Red Barber and Willie, Mickey and The Duke, and before you know it, you’ll be on the roof with your dog and your Bowman baseball card collection looking for a rescue helicopter.

Most of these guardians of the game do realize that commercialism has been gradually chipping away at the pastime they once knew. They know their cause is doomed. The handwriting has been literally on the wall for years.

It started with baseball selling its soul to television and moving all seven games of the World Series to prime time. Then came the DH, expansion of teams and the playoffs from five games to seven games to 12 games. Then came the extra 30 seconds between innings so TV could wedge another commercial in. Then came the rotating advertisements behind home plate, followed by the computer-generated placements we see today. It’s no coincidence that the greatest technological advancement in the game in the last 10 years, the superimposed ads behind home plate, came courtesy of television.

Now, there are ad breaks between nearly every at bat. Apparently, the advertising dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to, because whereas once an entire inning was brought to us by a proud sponsor, you can’t have a conference at the mound without it being brought to us by some beverage or automobile or some other demographic driven sponsor.

It’s a good thing Mike Hargrove, aka the Human Rain Delay, isn’t around anymore, otherwise we’d start getting pitches before the guy on the mound went into his windup. The Red Sox might want to think long and hard before they let Nomar Garciaparra leave because his glove-tugging antics between pitches could turn into a major windfall.

The traditionalists argue that this time it was different, that allowing logos on the field itself would have somehow sullied the game’s sanctity. Spidey on the bases was just the beginning of a slipper slope that would have eventually led to ads on uniforms, perhaps even superimposed in the base paths and the outfield grass.

This line has already been crossed in other sports. College football can’t seem to find enough advertisers to decorate the fields during bowl season. Company logos and slogans aren’t just limited to the boards in hockey or the sidelines in basketball anymore.

Just like these sports, some of which have been around as long as our former national pastime, baseball will overcome the pretense of tradition to increase the bottom line. We’ve already got Opening Day in Japan, which this year included ads on the uniforms. It’s probably no coincidence, but it is somehow fitting, that those Yankees/Devil Rays games were being played while everyone in America was hitting their snooze alarms.

The core of baseball’s following is aging, and MLB is biding its time, waiting for it to die out. The next generation of baseball fans will be smaller in number, but they will have been inundated with advertising from the time they were toddlers watching Nickelodeon. Their baseball upbringing will not have consisted of weekend pick-up games on the sandlot but Saturday afternoons spent watching the first two innings of a game on television, then turning on the X-Box or Playstation to play their own game before tuning in again for the last three outs.

They won’t be drawn by the game’s pace or its past, but by tape-measure home runs and radar gun readings. If they tune in to a baseball game and it doesn’t resemble a Microsoft production, they won’t stick around for long. Keeping the game pure won’t mean diddly to them because it wasn’t pure when they started watching it. What’s another soft drink advertisement, another beer logo, another intrusion into the game when you’ve been overwhelmed with intrusions your whole life.

The baby boomers are the last generation of baseball romanticists who have the wallets to back it up. If you’re under 40 and still hanging onto this notion that baseball is above the grip commercialism and materialism has on American society, not only haven’t you been paying much attention, but you’re in for a rude awakening.

If Spider-Man 2 drove you up a wall, just wait.