Charleston, S.C.
As you might expect for a team co-owned by Bill Murray, the class-A Charleston RiverDogs of Minor League Baseball excel at two things: trolling their opponents, and being consistently funny on a shoestring budget.
I moved to Charleston in August of last year and bought season tickets with a friend for this year. I had a feeling I was in the right place during an April 6-9 series against the Lexington Legends, whose logo on their hats is a handlebar mustache. Each time a visiting player came to the plate, none other than Parks & Recreation’s famously mustachioed Ron Swanson was displayed on the scoreboard staring down the Lexington batter’s photo. For an April 20 game against the Asheville Tourists—whose big-league affiliate, fittingly, are the Colorado Rockies—the RiverDogs held a “Legalize Marinara” night, which involved the promotional team handing out bags of oregano and parsley to all attendees and dumping four gallons of sauce on an intern seated in a kiddie-pool for each run the Dogs scored.
The list goes on:
– A helicopter regularly drops 10,000 bouncy-balls on the field after Saturday night games, with the added bonus of the spectacle doubling as a raffle (each ball is numbered);
– After a game on April 22, fans at Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park, home of the RiverDogs, set the Guinness World Record for number of people participating in a silly string fight;
– And May 5 was Cinco de MAYO, when people ate food covered or mixed with mayonnaise and tried to guess what the items were. (The worst? A banana milkshake.)
To sum it up, the theme of the upcoming August 5 game is called “’It’s All Been Done’ Night: An Exhaustive Celebration of [Minor League Baseball] Themes and Promotions: A Charleston RiverDogs Story.”
So suffice it to say I was looking forward to what the Dogs had in store for Tim Tebow, whose Columbia Fireflies visited Charleston last weekend.
Tebow, the former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback-turned-designated hitter, has reportedly sold out every stadium he’s visited. It was no different in Charleston. My companion and I arrived 80 minutes before the first pitch on Friday, and the lines at both entrances to the park were wrapped around the block. Baseball is a business, of course, so Tebow’s ability to generate crowds at small venues completely negates his ineptitude at the plate: He hits at the bottom of the batting order, hacking a brutal .224 with just three home runs and 21 RBI in 60 games.
After we made it inside the stadium, we found the shortest beer line and scurried to our seats, forced to sit next to each other instead of spread out in our usually empty section behind home plate. As Tebow was leaving the field after warmups, the institutionalized heckling began with a video on the scoreboard:
Three knocks on a door, which opened to show someone on the other side wearing a gray suit. “Hi, would you like to hear about our lord and savior, Timothy Richard Tebow?” The door slammed shut. Fin.
Throughout the game, every bit of the RiverDogs’ treatment of Tebow had one simple take on the man: He’s a failed quarterback who refused to play a position in the pros (tight end) for which he was better suited, is now trying to sell jerseys by playing organized baseball for the first time in nearly a decade—and y’all are this excited to see him?
The Fireflies players not named “Tim Tebow” were acknowledged as such whenever they came to bat, with their pictures set in front of the infamous Tebow Crying picture and their names displayed simply as “NOT TIM TEBOW.” When Tebow himself came to bat, his walk-up music was Handel’s “Messiah,” the chorus of “HAL-LE-LU-JAH’S!” echoing off the stadium walls. Between innings, a woman in a TEAM TEBOW shirt participated in a simply-premised game: $2-worth of concessions for every Firefly she could name.
She left with $2.
Dave Echols, the Dogs’ general manager, later apologized for the religiously themed elements of the home team’s heckling. “While we believe that our promotions were poking fun at Mr. Tebow’s celebrity status rather than his religion or baseball career, our intent was not to offend anyone, and for the fact that we did offend, we are sorry,” he told the Post and Courier. Echols said he’s received a mix of feedback; visiting fans quoted by the newspaper, however, didn’t seem too upset.
What transpired Friday aside, Tebow has brought the scorn of fans upon himself. He’s made it clear he is above single-A baseball, even if his performance says otherwise: He has his own security (understandable after a stalking incident during spring training) and his own personal trainer to stretch him out on-field before games, since being a designated hitter notoriously requires strenuous running. During any lull on Friday, he was in front of the dugout taking swings, even when the number-four hitter was at the plate. (He was batting eighth. But he needs to get his swings in.) He doesn’t act like just another guy on the team—if there was one thing that was clear, it’s that he wants to be seen.
The Fireflies return to Charleston from July 7-9 for another weekend series. Given the apology to people offended by some of their jokes, the RiverDogs surely will take a different tack during those games. They might have tiptoed too close to the line of what is and is not acceptable last weekend, but I hope they don’t step back from it entirely. My suggestion? That they rent a spotlight and shine it on Tebow any time he isn’t at the plate or in the field.
