Ballpark giveaways bring fans to games

Former Tribe owner Bill Veeck was the father of gimmicks.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- In the beginning, there were nylons.
Or so it seems. In all of baseball's religiously kept statistics, no one bothered to memorialize the first ballpark giveaway. But like archeologists musing over fossilized bones, baseball theorists believe the Milwaukee Brewers minor league club started a 60-year trend by doling out nylon stockings in the 1940s.
The bestowal of women's hosiery has succumbed, along with Halter Top Day, to gathering political forces, but the use of baseball gimmicks gets more aggressive every year as teams lure fans to the game while linking their hearts and minds with the advertisers who pay for the doodads.
Teams are handing out millions of dollars worth of caps, shirts and goofy gizmos, ranging from the now-traditional bobblehead dolls dispensed by the Minnesota Twins to coffee mugs with mug shots of arrested celebrities on them, furnished by the decidedly more irreverent St. Paul Saints minor league club.
Freebees
Baseball is king of the Freebee Nation. Though all pro sports offer complimentary souvenirs now and then, the long 162-game season played by major league teams seems to call for more value-added benefits, as they say in marketing circles, to put fannies in the seats.
The promotion-crazy Twins, for example, will give away a wide range of knick-knacks at more than half of their Metrodome games -- 46 of 81 dates. The team and its corporate sponsors will spend at least $500,000 on those giveaways, but dollar figures for all of baseball are unavailable. Educated guesses put the number at more than $20 million.
Is there hard evidence that each giveaway leads to X-number of additional fans spinning through the turnstyles? No. But the Twins, the Chicago Cubs and many other teams believe that if they offer pleasing giveaways, there's a payoff in building their brand image for years to come.
"Good promotions," said Patrick Klinger, the Twins' vice president for marketing, "will bring people to the ballpark."
Modern baseball history brims with stunts aimed at entertaining the clientele and providing a reason to come to the ballpark. A remarkable example of the latter occurred in 1951, when baseball impresario Bill Veeck, who owned the St. Louis Browns at the time, sent a dwarf to the plate wearing the number 1/8. The Detroit Tigers pitcher couldn't find his strike zone and walked him on four pitches.
Ushered in era
Indeed, it was showman Veeck who seemingly ushered in the giveaway era when, as owner of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, head his team give out nylon stockings during World War II.
Nylons were all the rage when they hit the United States in 1940, but once America entered the war, most nylon production went for military use. Many women missed them so much that they painted seams down the backs of their legs to appear to be wearing them. But somehow Veeck found enough nylons to give them away at a game, and he became a ladies favorite.
Veeck also is credited with launching the first Ladies Day when, as owner of the Cleveland Indians in 1948, he gave orchids to female fans. While owning the Browns in 1952, he created Bat Day, but under unusual circumstances.
"I think it was an accident," recalled his son, the equally whimsical Mike Veeck, president of the Goldklang Group, a Florham Park. N.J. company that owns the Saints and six other minor league clubs.
"He bought out the inventory of a bat company whose owner had to blow town rather suddenly," Mike Veeck said. "I think he was doing a friend a favor, and he just decided to give them away at a game."
Mike Veeck has kept pace with his late father. While working for his dad's Chicago White Sox in 1979, he engineered Disco Demolition Night, in which a trash bin filled with disco records contributed by fans was exploded between games of a doubleheader.
"I was smiling as I watched the Village People albums go 250 feet in the air, realizing they'd have to use those tool belts for other purposes," Veeck recalled.