You wish, Yankees.

With Spring Training here, it’s time for the most important part of any Major League Baseball preseason – checking out what kind of free stuff teams will be giving away this season. Naturally, most major market and successful teams worth a lick will be giving away the standards like t-shirts and hats, but teams that don’t do as well in drawing fans are sort of like fat girls in the bedroom, in that they need to be better at… certain things.

No team knows this better than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who are trying to gain more fan support not only for the sake of making money, but also to secure a new stadium deal. Of course this means that the team would need some pretty sweet freebies for the Rays faithful, and according to Tampa Bay Times beat writer Marc Topkin, Rays fans will be getting only the best this season.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a St. Louis Cardinals fan, my dog is considered to be classier and more intelligent than other dogs. Then again, she also likes to roll around in cat poop, so maybe she was a Mets fan in another life. Either way, no team can really hold a candle to having pooches as fans like the San Francisco Giants, as their annual Dog Days celebration is really something to behold. Sure, plenty of teams have a promotional day when fans can bring their best friends to the ballpark, but it just seems like the Giants go the extra mile in making me actually want to attend it so I can just squeeze all of the little furry faces.

On Saturday, more than 500 dogs took a trot around AT&T Park, and while it certainly didn’t break the Oakland Athletics’ record-setting parade of 718 canines, it was important in its own rights. This year’s Dog Days featured the Warrior Canine Connection, which is an awesome service that trains service dogs to help with the rehabilitation of military veterans who are dealing with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Again, dogs are the best.

After the jump, check out some of the best pooch costumes that showed up to the park.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today (June 21) is the first official day of summer, and the Texas Rangers are commemorating that in the most reasonable way possible: by handing out 30,000 sunglasses to fans at today’s Rangers vs. Astros game in an attempt to set a new world’s record for “Most People Wearing Sunglasses … in the Dark.”

I didn’t add those ellipses, they were in the press release. I love that the PR department wanted to leave you hanging, like you’d read “most people wearing sunglasses” and pause, thinking to yourself, “but the record for most people wearing sunglasses is much larger than that!” because you know a lot about world records, but then you follow the dots and it says “IN THE DARK” and you go “Oooooh wow, okay!”

More important technical information from the press release:

“Rangers’ fans will be asked to don their sunglasses beginning at the end of the sixth inning and wear them for 10 minutes to become part of history and set the world record. … An adjudicator from Guinness World Records will be on site to officially confirm the record.”

I’m guessing this is in response to May’s similar world record setting when the Los Angeles Angles set the mark for “most moonlighting Dodgers fans in wrestling masks“. By making the fans wear sunglasses for ten minutes, Texas will also be setting the records for “most Rangers fans who can’t see as well as they could a minute ago” and “most people interested in something the Astros are doing”.

In a related story, singer Corey Hart has been calling the Rangers all day, but they aren’t answering.

I’m not usually one to embrace hyperbole or throw around tired Interwebs jargon like “epic” or “bonertastic”, which I just made up, but I think it’s safe to say that “Team Ghost Riders” is the greatest minor league ballpark promotion of all-time. As you can see in the banner pic, the troupe features cowboy monkeys riding on dogs and herding goats. I could write down 1,000 of my favorite things in this world on tiny pieces of notebook paper, put them into a hat and draw three, and I still probably wouldn’t come up with something as awesome as this. Maybe if I drew “naked women”, “glass bottom boat” and “White House lawn” but that can be taken care of with a few hours on Craigslist.

Memphis rodeo cowboy Tim “Wild Thang” Lepard is the brilliant mastermind behind Team Ghost Riders and if Time Magazine and the Nobel Prize committee have any hair left on their respective beanbags, Tim will lead a clean sweep in every major award on the planet this year. Enough with the chit chat already. Let’s see some freaking cowboy monkeys riding dogs.

Read the rest of this entry »