Hat Trick

I am currently multi-tasking. With my left hand, I am typing the sentence that you are in the midst of reading. With my right, I am shaking a hat that is filled with small pieces of paper. On each of these pieces of paper, a potential Ben's Biz Blog topic is written.

It is now time to choose.

Okay, here we go:

USA! USA! -- From the "Promotions That I Missed" department comes this one staged by the Hudson Valley Renegades. On July 1st, the club held "Born in the USA Night", in which four pre-selected immigrant fans competed to have their neutralization process paid for by the Renegades. Said the Renegades in the press release:

Tuesday night the Renegades will do something that has never been done before by starting one fan on the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. What goes better than baseball, fireworks and America? Nothing...that is why the Renegades are going to complete the trio for one deserving fan.

Okay, time to reach into the hat once again...

Apropos of Nothing -- I am on the email list of many Minor League teams, but the missives of one club in particular have recently caught my eye. That club is the Charleston RiverDogs, whose game recap headlines utilize verbs that are rarely used in the world of sports journalism. Let's take a look at the headlines from the recent series against the Lexington Legends:

RiverDogs Forget Legends, 2-0 (July 7)
Legends Loom Large Over RiverDogs, 3-1 (July 8)
RiverDogs Discredit Legends, 5-4 (July 9)

So, to summarize, on Monday the RiverDogs defeated the Legends by effectively erasing them from memory. The Legends overcame the RiverDogs' amnesia the next day by developing a temporary size advantage that allowed them to tower above their opponents. But the momentum from that triumph did not last, as the RiverDogs won the following afternoon by using their powers of logic and oratorical skill to effectively dismantle the cunning but ultimately empty sophistry of the Legends.

Kudos to the RiverDogs' Media Relations Department for tapping into the unlimited potential of the English language. And now I proceed to the hat for the third and final time.

Recommended Link! Several times in the past, I have referred my loyal cadre of readers to the excellent gameops.com. Recently, the site featured a "Pro Panel", in which five sports industry executives gave their two cents on how they would respond to the following scenario:

You are in this position: Your shipment of 20,000 bobbleheads arrives on Friday for your game on Saturday. You take them out of the box and notice that the player seems to be giving you the finger. You have 36 hours until game time, a sponsor is attached to the promotion, and tickets have been selling briskly in anticipation of the giveaway.

What do you do?

It goes without saying that the resulting responses make for some excellent reading. It's like an episode of 24 for sports industry professionals. And, of course, this scenario was inspired by a recent real-life situation.