Tonight Pam and Kaitlin are taking me to a Flying
Squirrels game for my birthday. We have seats on the lower level, first base side right behind
the dugout. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful night, in the 70’s. Can’t
wait!
We will sample the unique cuisine of baseball. There
will be ballpark hotdogs, giant soft pretzels, popcorn that comes in that
familiar striped red box, and of course cotton candy. This year, Flying
Squirrel fans will get to try a new locally brewed beer that we all got a
chance to name…chin music. Then there’s
dippin dots, that strange, otherworldly ice cream imitation that sounds and
looks horrible but somehow works only at the ballpark. There will be those
wonderful carnival barker guys who walk up and down the aisles hawking
everything from peanuts to cold beer. There’s just about no place on earth I
would rather be on a Friday night.
Minor league baseball may be the best entertainment
value in America. First of all, at least on the Double-A level, the players are
young and quite good. They hustle as if they have something to prove on every
play, which they actually do. These guys don’t have the entitled swagger of
their big league brethren. There’s not a lot of batting glove adjustments and
long walks out of the batter’s box after every pitch. They are mostly 21 year
olds with a dream and they play with a sort of unbridled energy, eager to
impress. Because these games aren’t televised, the games are played at a must
faster pace which is something MLB could learn from. These guys don’t take a
lot of pitches. See ball, hit ball.
Then there’s the marketing department of the Flying
Squirrels, a sort of Barnum & Bailey meets WWE. Every half inning features
some zany madcap game featuring kids playing horse shoes with toilet seats or
some such thing. Once every game a bunch of grounds crew guys run out in
dresses and blond wigs to sweep the infield and advertise Molly Maids. It’s
non-stop tom-foolery until the final out.
Five years ago when the Flying Squirrels replaced
our beloved Braves, the name Flying
Squirrels was something of an embarrassment and source of great derision. Of
all the things to name a team from Richmond, Virginia, which hadn’t had an
actual flying squirrel sighting maybe EVER. If I was going to name a team from
Richmond I would have gone with something that its citizens could understand
and appreciate..like the Monuments, or the Rebels, the Virginians, or even the
Insufferable Old-Money Bluebloods. But the Flying Squirrels?? Well, this just
proves how little I know about marketing. Somehow it caught on in a huge way
and is now one of the most popular Minor League mascots in the business. “Nutsy”
is the man, although if he ever showed up in my back yard he would feel the
wrath of my BB gun.
There are a lot of things wrong in America at the
moment, but thank God, minor league baseball isn’t one of them.
