Seinfeld was famously a show about nothing. It turned out to be pretty popular. But what if a baseball game had nothing going on but the play on the field? That’s what the Triple-A Minor League Baseball Louisville Bats tried out this week.
Minor League Baseball teams are always trying new and creative promotions to bring fans to the yard. But “Nothing Night”? What does that even mean?
As the Louisville Bats explained, it means “no music, ad reads, videos or on-field promotions. Just baseball in its purest form.”
Sounds heavenly. And it was. Just watch… and listen.
‘We have a tendency to overdo it’
“We have a tendency to overdo it in this new day and age, we almost take it too far with all the noise and promotions,’’ team president Greg Galiette told BallNine on Wednesday.
“If you went back to the 1930s or 40s, this is what it would have been like, you would have walked into a ballpark and the only noise you would have heard would have been the ballpark organist playing. There was no walk-up music, no in-game promotions on the field, the video board was quiet, except for just the line score.”
“We did keep the miles per hour up to keep the coaches happy but everything else was pretty much stripped away and it was kind of baseball as we remember it back in the old days,” Galiette continued.
“I didn’t have to put on any relaxing jazz piano music, which I normally do in my office during the day, to keep things calm, it is such a rapid business that we are in. It was nice. It was different.
He added that “it was almost like playing baseball in a library, but it was cool to hear the crack of the bat and stuff like that and the ball hitting the mitt, it takes you back.’’
In today’s high-tech world, where everything is on demand, a “Nothing Night” at the ballpark might be just what the world needs more of. Sometimes in life, less is more.