Jeff Miller/Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin
Minor League Baseball is everything that is right about professional sports. It’s cheap to attend, fun to watch, and oftentimes makes absolute no sense at all. I mean, where else are you going to find a place to sit on literal toilet seats during a baseball game? You just don’t see that kind of commitment to the bit anymore.
The thing about Minor League Baseball is that while it is great on its own, sometimes organizations go above and beyond to head the call of fans. Take the Fresno Grizzlies, who rebranded briefly to the Fresno Tacos and rocked these absolute beauties. Or the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs and their remarkable bacon hats.
Lest you think I am just hungry, I present to you the Binghamton Bathtub Donkeys of the Double-A Eastern League.
Splish Splash, we were taking a bath. 🛁🫏https://t.co/6UGg14a8kR pic.twitter.com/Ky2qVQYnfN
— Binghamton Rumble Ponies (@RumblePoniesBB) January 13, 2025
The Mets affiliate is typically known as the Binghamton Rumble Ponies (a name assumed in 2017 after several years as the Binghamton Mets). But for select games this coming season, they are switching things up.
Why, you ask, are they called the Bathtub Donkeys? Well, we’re here to help!
“We began to dig into the kind of laws that are just kind of bizarre and wacky, like Minor League Baseball is,” director of marketing and promotion Eddie Saunders said on MiLB.com’s “The Show Before The Show” podcast. “We found this law that in the 1800s, in Brooklyn. … you could not have a sleeping donkey in your bathtub on Sundays.”
You might now think you yourself, “that seems like an oddly specific law.” Yes, yet it is! But there is a good reason for it!
“The story behind it, there was a donkey that was sleeping in a bathtub and a flood came and washed the donkey and the tub away,” Saunders continued. “And then they had to use a lot of resources to get the donkey back to its rightful owner and home. So that’s where we went with it.”
But wait, there’s more! Benjamin Hill of MLB.com discovered that both Arizona and Oklahoma have similar laws! Folks. Donkeys are for barns or pens, NOT Bathtubs. We should not need a law for this! In fact, most of us do not, it seems! But New Yorkers are odd birds. And so gave rise to the Binghamton Bathtub Donkeys. We are better for their existence, and I’ve never purchased a hat so quickly in my life.