Tuesday was a historic day for baseball in western New York, as the Rochester Red Wings, the Triple-A affiliate of the Washington Nationals, introduced beer bats.
Beer bats.
Beer.
Bats.
Eating from helmets at the ballpark is great, whether it’s ice cream, fries, nachos, or even meatloaf (yes, meatloaf). But you can’t drink beer out of a helmet. Well, you could, but it would be incredibly messy.
Naturally, the beer bats in Rochester were an instant hit. Anybody could have seen that coming. It’s a beer… in a bat! And people are loving beer bats everywhere this summer, from Frederick, Md., to Asheville, N.C., to Des Moines, Iowa, to Wenatchee, Wash. Earlier this year, Budweiser advocated for the distribution of beer bats to every baseball stadium. And they’re right.
Unfortunately, it’s all gone wrong in Rochester.
It feels like it should not have been possible to underestimate the demand for beer bats. Take the capacity of your stadium, multiply it by the maximum number of beer bats that one fan would be allowed to buy before being considered overserved (this is where you have to know your market — some places can really put away the brews), and, boom, there’s how many beer bats you need per game — because people are going to max out on beer bats, which, again, are beers served in bats.
What’s concerning here is the “holes in the bottom of roughly half of them.” What happened to pride in craftsmanship? When you’re making a product as important as beer bats, there needs to be the strictest of quality control standards. Perhaps there was an issue in shipping, because this problem has not been reported anywhere else, and it would be awfully tough on business for Samiam Group, which holds the patent on The Beer Bat, and retails them for $24.99 to individuals, with an invitation on their website to contact them for bulk orders of 500 or more bats.
Here’s hoping that the Red Wings get a new shipment soon, because once you go beer bat, you never go back, and Rochester deserves this.
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