On Alaskan daylight, foul balls and such

Right now, I’m vacationing in Alaska.  Like our trip out East, I’m trying to see all things baseball.  Fortunately, there is the Alaska Baseball League.  The ABL is a summer league geared towards college players. 

The ABL is famous for their annual “Midnight Sun Game” which is played from 10:30 to about 1:30am.  This is because of course, the sunlight lasts so long up here during the day (I can verify this… I went to bed at midnight last night and it was still light out.  Woke up at 5am and it was light out again.  I have yet to see it really dark). 

I wasn’t able to make it to the Midnight Sun Game which happened in June but yesterday, our family attended a game between the Anchorage Glacier Pilots and the Fairbanks Goldpanners at Anchorage’s Mulcahy Stadium.  The Glacier Pilots share Mulcahy Stadium with the ABL’s Anchorage Bucs which I sure makes team marketing a headache.

I had fun browsing the the Glacier Pilots’ Wall of Fame.  Alumnus include Randy Jones, Mickey Hatcher and a couple from my APBA league team, the Twin City Thunderchickens including Mark McGwire and current bench warmer, Eric Hinske (though they spelled his name wrong, oops!). 

Speaking of marketing headaches, the ABL (or perhaps the Glacier Pilots) have implemented an in-game advertising gimmick to bring in a few needed bucks.  Whenever there was a foul ball by either team, the PA announcer would say. “This foul ball was brought to by Carl’s Jr.”  EVERY time. Every foul ball (except strangely not foul tips).  The PA announcer almost sounded apologetic when he said it. 

Now, I don’t really like this particular method of advertising (actually, I hate it) and this is probably not new.  But beyond that, I find it interesting that the marketing people would choose the foul ball as the game event to sponsor.  Of all the actions and results in the game of baseball, it really is such an non-event.  It’s a negative result for the batter and not always positive for the pitcher (can’t strike out on it).  I joked to my wife that I wouldn’t go Carl’s Jr since they were responsible for all these foul balls. 

Carl’s Jr did come through for my daughter, though.  A bullpen pitcher who sadly was not needed (the Goldpanners rallied for four runs in the 10th) threw her a baseball from the field.  She turned it around and on it was the Carl’s Jr logo.  She giggled hearing me rant about it earlier.

That all said, we had a great time.  I don’t begrudge the ABL too much for their marketing stunt.  Times are tough and it looked like attendance might have been down.  As you can tell from the photo, the view from the stands was spectacular. 

I posted plenty of photos on Facebook if you haven’t seen them yet. 

Go Pilots!