Alex Call aimed at the wrong screen. He saw Sydney Sweeney with her clothes off and called it "soft porn ads" that don't belong on a family broadcast. He's not wrong that the ad is tacky. But the product she's selling is what's actually going to follow his son around.
Call, watching the NLCS from home because he isn't on the Dodgers' active roster, posted directly at the league this week: "Can we please get the soft porn ads off playoff broadcasts, TBS, Fox, NBC, @MLB?" He followed that with the line everyone latched onto: "My son wants to watch baseball with Dada, but how do I justify that when a half-naked women could come on screen anytime?? This is America's Pastime. Parents shouldn't have to worry about this."
The Sweeney ad is for Novig, a prediction-market platform. CNN called it a "nude sports-prediction ad" and, in the same breath, "a new sports betting ad." Fox News called it a "controversial Novig sports betting ad." The nudity grabs the eye, but the betting pitch is what sticks. A kid who tunes out a provocative commercial will still absorb, round after round, the idea that betting on the game he's watching is normal.
Strip away the skin and the real problem is still there. The scale of it is grotesque: tick-level trade data showed more than $1.5 billion in 30-day turnover across Kalshi and Polymarket MLB markets alone. That's why the ad load feels inescapable. It's a whole category drowning the broadcast.
So when Call tags MLB and asks the league to do something about it, he's asking the wrong party. MLB is on the payroll. The league partnered with Polymarket on postseason content. Polymarket's "HQ" campaign is fronted by Derek Jeter alongside LeBron James, Eli Manning and Spike Lee. Kalshi, the rival, signed Ronald Acuna Jr., an active, former-MVP outfielder who could be playing in these very games. The same sport begging for sympathy over gambling saturation turned its own legends into billboards.
Asking MLB to pull a betting ad for being indecent is asking the house to switch off its own cash register. It won't happen. The money is the whole plan.
Is Call really worried about gambling, or just squeamish about a woman's body? His complaint names the skin and nothing else. The female athletes who went after this campaign first, Ariarne Titmus among them, were talking about sexism and the exploitation of women in sport, a different argument entirely. Titmus wrote, "I can't describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this... How do we live in a world where monetizing a woman's body and sexualizing women's sport is still a thing?" That's a real objection, separate from Call's.
Sweeney, for her part, is enjoying every second of this. Her follow-up ad has her saying, "There are grown men making spreadsheets to bet on what color underwear I'm wearing," before adding, "I mean, I'm flattered?" She's an actress taking a check from a betting company that bought the attention on purpose.
She's not the only awkward thing in the commercial break, either. Megan Fox spent the Braves-Phillies Wild Card finale in a red catsuit pitching an erectile-dysfunction drug for Ro Sparks. The playoff ad breaks are a circus, and dads like Call have every right to be annoyed.
Just point the anger at the right target. The flash of skin fades in thirty seconds. The pitch that gambling is a normal part of loving baseball is what MLB is selling your kid on purpose, and it gets paid twice for the privilege: once for the ad, once for the partnership. The call is coming from inside the house.
