BIG Shticks

Jake the Diamond Dog bolts out of his doghouse behind first base, runs down a foul ground ball and retrieves it for the umpire.

Later, pigs wearing numbers race around the bases between innings. Kids compete in a peanut butter sandwich-making contest. And a volunteer strapped inside the “human bowling ball” rolls around the outfield as the crowd roars.

The spirit of P.T. Barnum lives on in minor league baseball, where small teams wield big shticks to pack in the crowds-the cornier, goofier and cheaper the better for those promoting their all-American product.

This truly is marketing at its grassroots the kind you don’t learn at Harvard Business School.

“There’s nothing like it in terms of being innovative,” said general manager Jeff Sedivy of the Kane County Cougars, a Class A team in the Midwest League.

Sedivy, a former college player turned insurance underwriting manager, gave up a job in the corporate business world for the love of the game and the gimmick.

“It’s stupid stuff, but it works,” he said with a grin.

Actually, it doesn’t always work, but even when gimmicks fail, they can be good for business in the bush leagues, where baseball alone isn’t usually enough to draw profitable crowds.

Badly botched promotions are at once “awful and wonderful,” said Mike Veeck, son of pioneering baseball promoter Bill Veeck and co-owner of five minor league teams.

Fans in this town an hour west of Chicago, for example, are still talking about the day that Jymmy the Villain bombed, the infield caught fire and the karate didn’t chop.

When Midwest League executives gathered here recently for their all-star game, the Jymmy the Villain game was cited by several as a particularly bizarre event.

“It was the worst promotion and the best promotion we ever did,” said Scott Lane, now the general manager of the West Michigan Whitecaps. He was with the Cougars when Jymmy made his ill-fated appearance at a Kane County game seven years ago.

Claiming to be a “rock “n’ roll magician” with circus experience, Jymmy promised a memorable show in which he’d walk a high wire from the press box to home plate. He also was going to juggle chain saws.

‘We were dumb enough to believe him,” said Bill Larsen, the Cougars’ boss at the time and now general manager of the Fort Wayne Wizards.

On game day, Jymmy’s assistants lugged a coffin in from center field and set it down next to a small trampoline. The performer emerged, wearing a black cape and devil’s mask.

The revised plan: Jymmy would wow the crowd by doing a flip off the trampoline over soaring flames, landing on his feet. Then he would break a stack of boards with a karate chop.

But while Jymmy pirouetted around the field in his costume, his handlers stood uneasily holding a flaming 2-by-4, waiting until they could wait no longer.

‘These guys can’t hold it any more, so they drop it and the grass catches on fire,” Larsen said. “Then he comes running in and flips over it and lands on his back. He’s out cold.

‘Finally, he gets up and goes over to the boards behind home plate. He winds up and hits it--nothing gives. He hits it again and his hand breaks.”

Promotions don’t have to fail to be memorable.

The junior Veeck has had hits ,with a massage-giving nun and a sunglasses-wearing pig that delivers balls to the home-plate umpire at St. Paul Saints games. Every night’s a giveaway night for the Whitecaps and some other teams. Clubs have pulled in huge crowds for Bald Night, Irish Night with green bases and caps and Lawyer Appreciation Night.

But it’s the marketing misfires that live on the most fondly in fans’ memories. Minor league executives described a few others:

KALITA THE NOT-SO- GREAT -- A month after the Jymmy fiasco, the Cougars hired a man billed as Kalita the Great who was chained and dumped, a la Houdini, into a vat of beer mounted on a truck behind home plate.

An almost eerie quiet fell over the crowd as Kalita labored to escape from the curtained-off vat.

‘All of a sudden one of the players yells out, ‘Hey, I can see his leg outside the vat! He’s a fake!... recalls Larsen.

Chaos ensued, and the rattled Kalita sloshed his way quickly out of the container, spilling beer all over the homeplate area. Cougars catcher Charles Johnson, who now plays for the Baltimore Orioles, paid the price.

“Flies and gnats swarmed to the beer and Johnson spends the whole game trying to swat them away while he catches,” Larsen said.

GREASED PIG NIGHT -- The Charleston RiverDogs greased up a pig named Tommy so kids could chase him around the field. But Tommy ran down the right-field line and out of the ballpark, right into a swamp. “Helicopters from the SPCA looked for Tommy for two days,” Veeck said.

MIME-O-VISION -- Veeck hired five mimes in St. Paul to re-enact plays and make instant replay obsolete. “By the fifth inning the fans were throwing everything that wasn’t nailed down.”

FLYING HOT DOGS -- The Blues Brothers, a copycat group popular at games around the Midwest, tried its own version of the stunt of shooting water balloons into the crowd with giant slingshots. They fired up a hot dog loaded with the works, hitting a fan in the face and nearly provoking a fist fight.

VASECTOMY NIGHT -- The RiverDogs planned to give away a free vasectomy on Father’s Day in 1997. They canceled the promotion after receiving complaints.

BORING PET TRICKS-’We tried to steal from Letterman and do Stupid Pet Tricks, but the pets wouldn’t do anything,” Sedivy said. “The best we got was a dog that supposedly played soccer. Turned out he ate the ball instead.”