I Hate Gimmicks, Too

I understand there is a field in the business world called Marketing, and I know people are paid handsome salaries to “market” things. When a product is successfully marketed, it makes more money, hopefully enough to at least pay for the Marketing Department, if not more. I acknowledge it, but I don’t have to like it.

Even where marketing is required, as in a new product that you have to get the word out or nobody will even know about it, there is something that I find faintly off-putting. But to be fair, I realize this is a lot more a fact about about me than it is a fact about the world.

That said, baseball is, will be, and will always be (to the extent it continues to exist) passed down by baseball fans who create other baseball fans in their acquaintances and, mostly, in subsequent generations. But, I suppose, at the margins there may be some non-baseball fan NASCAR fan who can be brought to the game by seeing one played at the Bristol Motor Speedway. I can guarantee that there won’t be enough to pay for this gimmick, and indeed I suspect that even with a game that will draw the largest live crowd in baseball history, the paying customers won’t even manage to cover the costs of converting Bristol for a day to an ersatz ballpark.

I am pretty certain that you cannot “grow the game” by hosting one at Bristol. But maybe there’s another reason: maybe the idea is to take current baseball fans, many of whom are also NASCAR fans, and present them with a sort of a gift — a mashup gimmick. It’s not an attempt to broaden the appeal of the sport — it’s just a way of saying thank you to some particular fan cohort.

Ummmm… no. Yale and Harvard have played each other in football 140 times. I have attended the last 49 of them and plan to go to my 50th this year. Harvard Stadium, the oldest (built in 1903) NCAA football stadium in the country, currently seats about 25,000 people and just about sells every seat for the Yale game in even years. (It used to hold about 40,000, but various temporary stands have been retired.) In 2018, though, Harvard decided to hold the contest in Fenway Park. Like Bristol, this enabled a bump in attendance and no end of articles “marketing” the Yale-Harvard game, an event which I can guarantee you needs no marketing at all.*

Of course, a baseball park, particularly one as quirkily configured as Fenway Park , is a pretty terrible place to watch a football game. They did their best, I suppose, although Yale fans were allocated to end zone seats only, and I was a little dismayed to find that, even as a long time season ticket holder with 20 season tickets, that we were allocated seats in the upper deck down the third base line (pictured above). As it happened, the seats weren’t terrible, but as a “gift” to alumni of the two schools, it was more like a Trojan Horse. You might also notice that attendance looks really bad, but this was a minute into the game and it’s a late-arriving crowd — it was reasonably full after halftime, but still not that much larger attendance than a game at Harvard Stadium – official attendance was 34,675. Attendance at my first one, in 1974, was a sellout at 40,500.

Just as a baseball park is a bad place to see a football game (and, by the way, anyone who saw a Falcons game at Atlanta Stadium can second this) I suspect a NASCAR track is a bad place to see a baseball game. Seems like an odd way to “market” baseball or to “reward” your fans.

So it’s a gimmick. And a gimmick with rain, apparently. You just hope nobody gets hurt.

The Game

Once Tug McGraw’s kid and Pit Bill had done their thing, the rain started. Two hours and twenty minutes ensued filled with everything they had planned to show on Fox during the game, as well as ad libs with Big Papi. It was horrible, and I was worried that this would be the highlight of the evening.

Spencer Strider had warmed up and Snit decided not to let him pitch. I trust there is no one outside of Spencer’s head who second guesses this decision. On the other side, Terry Francona (I love it that he is known by his Dad’s nickname, Tito) decided to let his young phenom, Chase Burns, pitch. Burns strikes out a lot of guys but has an ERA over 6.

The Braves did nothing in the top of the first and the Reds scored in the bottom of the first, but they played most of the bottom haalf in the rain. I mean, real rain. Austin Cox managed 17 pitches before the second rain delay.

The game is now suspended and will be picked up tomorrow with a 1-0 score in the bottom of the first.

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* Actually, The Game could use a lot more marketing in odd years, where they now have great difficulty selling more than 40,000 of the now-60,000 seat Yale Bowl. (I attended a couple of games with 70,000, but that’s now ancient history.) But that’s neither here nor there.