Field of schemes
Summer baseball is hot. But not if you are eating cheap burgers and margaritas.
Summer and baseball fit together like hand and glove, even in Baton Rouge, where the games keep going after LSU’s season ends and Alex Box goes quiet.
That leaves room for the Baton Rouge Rougarou, now in their third season and trying to build on an early run that already includes last year’s Texas Collegiate League title.
But minor league baseball has never survived on the baseball alone. It needs theater.
The Altoona Curve once created a proudly awful ballpark night, blaring William Shatner songs, showing batting averages as “failure averages,” staging onion bobbing and handing the first 1,000 fans a photo of a recently removed gallbladder.
The Rougarou are working from a more digestible playbook.
They have fireworks on Fridays during the seventh-inning stretch, Bally’s Party Deck with never-ending hot dogs, and Tramonte’s hamburgers and Margaritas for the outlandish price of $3.
The swag is strong, too, including a Skip Bertman Rougarou bobblehead, which is the kind of sentence that justifies summer baseball all by itself.
Bottom line: LSU owns the spring. But summer belongs to Goldsby Field, preferably on burger night, with Hawaiian shirts encouraged.