9-9-9, Closer Entrances, And Making Fetch Happen

A couple things have induced dread in me in baseball’s first week. There have been major wins — the Yankee pitching staff is fantastic! ABS is a lot of fun! — but some cringey losses. The first is the corporatization of the 9-9-9 task, a Twitter meme that challenges fans to consume nine hot dogs and nine beers across the length of a nine-inning game. We at SB Nation cannot condone irresponsible drinking but it is a meme that’s not that hard to find across various social platforms.

Of course MLB teams can’t endorse irresponsible drinking either, and are in many jurisdictions legally capped on how many standard drinks they can sell at one time or in certain time frames. The logical endpoint to this is that teams can’t advertise that they want you to drink nine full-sized beers over the course of what may be a two and a half hour game, ergo, we get a cheap facsimile like what the San Francisco Giants had to offer Opening Weekend. Nine hot dogs that are better described as “hot dogs with slider characteristics” and a single 24-oz beer with nine flight glasses. They appear to be about 4 oz. glasses, although flights in general range from 2-6. Pretty simple math tells us that you’re out of your one allotted beer by the seventh inning — not even close to the spirit of the challenge.

In related news, we also got to see just how sauceless the baseball hegemon has become:

Now I don’t know who this young woman is, I’m sure she’s very nice and I’m damn sure she’s a better musician than me, but she is struggling and it didn’t get much better in Edwin Diaz’s second outing. This was followed up on Saturday with Mason Miller’s new entrance, which at this point just looks like everyone else’s:

Sparky Lyle was the first star reliever to really make an entrance An Entrance, just over 50 years ago. In 1963, in-stadium organists would play live to announce a pitching change, but in 1972 the 27-year old Lyle was gifted Pomp and Circumstances to accompany his Datsun-assisted arrival to the game, a gimmick that lightened up the darkness that were those early-70s Yankee squads.

A few closers since have had An Entrance, though my favorite part of Mariano Rivera’s was that the team asked him “hey Mo how do you feel about using this song” and he mostly shrugged and said yeah sure fine. But even in the Hall of Famer’s last ever appearance at the Stadium, he didn’t have the whole shindig about it:

I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a curmudgeon — then again maybe some curmudgeonly behavior would be useful right now — but I don’t think everyone needs a production, and if you’re going to get a production, make it good.

I do think the attempt to re-create the 9-9-9 and the push to give every single closer an entrance are related. We’re all in the content business, MLB included, we’re all trying to get short-form vertical video, we’re all trying to get segments on a podcast talking about the new menus this year. I don’t fault MLB for chasing those eyeballs, I just think you can’t commoditize them. One team having a designated home run celebration is fun and remarkable, all 30 having a designated prop turns things into an assembly line — hit home run, do celebration on camera. Call the bullpen, flicker the lights a bunch, repeat.

I actually have to give MLB a lot of credit over the past few seasons. It’s done a great job of highlighting what makes the game exciting — the era of Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge may lead to some oversaturation but when both have lived up to their billing it’s hard to get too grumpy about it. Ditto for Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal. The World Baseball Classic drew more eyeballs than the NBA finals. Baseball is on a rise without the need to push the gimmicks.

There are always going to be spontaneous moments that bring in more joy to baseball. The Mets and Gay Grimace were a perfect example, or when Ronald Torreyes pretended to be a late night host almost a decade ago. Handing out a toy video camera to the first 20,000 fans on one Thursday night would have been a great idea. Handing them out every single night kills the gimmick. Bringing memes from the offline world into the online carries more risk than I’m confident MLB PR teams can handle, and we all need to be more judicious about just who deserves flashing lights in the ninth.