Stadium Food For Thought

In the late 80's or maybe early 90's, I'm not quite sure, there was an attempt to bring higher quality food into baseball stadiums. At dodger stadium this resulted in pizza hut, carl's jr., a pretty cool gourmet sausage cart, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. The important thing is baseball made an attempt to raise the culinary level of stadium faire in an attempt to make more money off higher income people who frown on low quality stadium food.

As a total detour from that older idea is a new idea (I think) that would have teams/stadium/concession company would work together to brand or re-brand certain stadium faire to tie into their particular team or even to particular players. In addition, they could come up with entirely new offerings that would make sense if tied to a certain member of the team. I'm going to take a wild guess and venture that Russell Martin sells a lot of jerseys. Thing is jerseys are expensive. How many extra boxes of cracker jacks could be sold if a picture of Russell Martin were on the box at the stadium? How about a branded hot-dog already dressed up with the condiments Matt Kemp puts on his own hot dog? Kosher Shawn Green dog? Oops, he's not on the team anymore.

There are big downsides to the above idea. First, players get traded left and right, even the superstar players. Mark Tiexiera just got traded a month ago from Texas to Atlanta. Secondly I'm going to assume since I didn't research this that if you use the name and players likenesses that MLB now gets a cut out of something they didn't used to and the increased sales aren't worth having to share the wealth. What happens when a formerly popular player goes through a really tough time, do people shy away from his branded food products?

Wow. finally bored myself with the idea. Anyways, in a world where the grasp of product placement seems to reach farther farther into our lives and homes, don't be surprised if MLB tries to reach out for a few more dollars by being a bit more unconventional in its attempts to get people to spend even more money for the same crappy food at your nearest MLB stadium.