Hurray For Minor League Baseball...And Silliness

The minor league Albuquerque Isotopes announced this week that at some point during the summer they will be wearing “Better Call Saul” jerseys. The TV show “Better Call Saul” and the show off of which it spun, “Breaking Bad,” are both set in New Mexico, so the jersey makes a certain amount of sense.

It makes more sense than the jerseys the members of the minor league Omaha Storm Chasers will wear.

They feature characters from the Star Wars movies, and although Star Wars is set in a number of different places, none of them are Omaha. In fact, none of them are in Nebraska, unless there are towns there called Tatooine or Tipoca City, and I just don’t know about them

Baseball loves silly promotions. Major League teams of the past have featured such gloriously stupid and destructive celebrations as Disco Demolition Night, not to mention any number of 10-Cent Beer nights. How could there ever have been any more than one of those?

Minor league teams have sailed over the edge with such extravaganzas as the fabled and probably late Dynamite Lady. Her act was to crawl into a cardboard box at home plate and blow herself up.

So, hooray, say I for the teams that put Star Wars characters and Better Call Saul on their jerseys. If the players feel silly going to work dressed that way, they can take some solace from the fact that they’re participating in a grand tradition of not taking themselves seriously. On a sports landscape too much given to pompous, self-important promotion, thank goodness there’s still a little room for the ridiculous.