LoanDepot Park, Miami (The Bobblehead Museum)

 

I love baseball, and there are many things about it that I feel that I understand pretty well. I understand the rules, which can be completely baffling to someone who didn’t grow up with the game. I understand the unwritten rules, like the fact that when a foul ball hits the catcher and he needs a minute to recuperate, the umpire will walk out to the pitcher’s mound to give the pitcher a new ball, then slowly walk back and dust off the plate before play resumes I understand the strategy, at a deeper level every year. I understand the statistics, and which ones are meaningful and which ones aren’t. I understand a lot of the history.

One thing I don’t understand, although I am fascinated by it, is the game’s fascination with bobbleheads.

Those are the little figurines, about six inches tall, with the likeness of a player, either in an action pose, commemorating some achievement (winning an award, throwing a no-hitter), or in some promotional-appropriate pose (in an outfit appropriate for Star Wars Day or Game of Thrones Day, in a spacesuit for a giveaway celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Moon landing, with a fishing rod if he’s an avid fisherman, etc.). Or sometimes, the bobblehead is of an announcer, or a mascot, or someone else associated with the team, or even of Hello Kitty (??). Crucially, there’s a spring-loaded mechanism in the neck so that the head “bobbles” when it is shaken, even gently.

If you really want to see the breadth of bobbleheads, you can visit the Miami Marlins’ Bobblehead Museum. It’s on the concourse in centerfield, and hosts about 600 bobbleheads. Each year, each team donates one of each of the bobbleheads they gave out the previous season (usually about a half-dozen per team), and the collection in the display is changed out, with the rest stored in the museum’s archives. Yes, there’s a museum with an archive of bobbleheads. There’s a section for bobbleheads from each team, but there are also sections for various themed bobbleheads. And the shelves all vibrate, so that the heads all bobble, although some have a little more motion than others.

 

 

According to Wikipedia’s history of bobbleheads, the first ones were figures of Buddha made in 17^th Century Asia. The first baseball bobbleheads were made in 1960, and the popularity really took off in the late 1990s. Maybe I don’t understand the fascination because they were not a part of the game when I was learning it, or even when I first started going to a lot of games.

Our personal bobblehead museum

With season tickets to the Diamondbacks, we now have a collection of bobbleheads. On bobblehead days, the gates open 2½ hours before gametime for season ticket holders, and two hours for the general public, as opposed to the normal 90 minutes for everyone. And the plaza outside the stadium is packed with people standing in line, even if the temperature is 110° Fahrenheit.

Of course, once you start to build a collection of bobbleheads, you have to figure out what to do with them. They are “collectibles”, after all. Kerry has taken care of that, and has turned a built-in bookcase in what is now her sewing room into her own bobblehead museum. They aren’t organized like Miami’s, since they are (almost) all from Diamondback giveaways. But she has sections for current players, past stars, other former players, and random giveaways. Plus, there’s an area where a bobblehead can face the wall if she’s so unhappy with a player at the moment that his bobblehead needs to be placed in timeout (there are only a couple in permanent timeout).

 

The game:

Today’s game was an afternoon game, with the Cincinnati Reds beating the Marlins, 5-2. In many ways it was similar to last night’s game, with a small (under 7000) crowd, no big innings, and generally decent baseball with a couple of peculiar things.

One of the peculiarities was that the Reds scored eight runs in the last two games, and won one of them, without ever having an inning where they scored more than one run. Often (more than half the time; I’ve kept statistics on it), the winning team will score at least as many runs in a single inning as the other team does in the whole game, so it’s the big innings that decide things. But this was a series of small innings.

Another was that the Reds stole four bases in each of the two games. As I mentioned last night, the total number of stolen bases we’d seen in the five previous games we’d been to this year was four. The Reds aren’t leading the league in stolen bases (although they moved way up this week), but they were very aggressive. I don’t know whether the Marlins’ pitchers are uniformly bad at holding runners close to the base, whether the Marlins’ catchers can’t throw well (what I thought last night, until the Reds got exactly the same number of stolen bases with a different catcher today), or what. It is fun to watch, though.

It also had one of the more peculiar double plays I’d ever seen. With runners on first and second and one out, the batter hit a ground ball to the shortstop, who threw to the second baseman, who stepped on second to force out the runner from first. The second baseman made the throw to first to try to get the batter as well, but the batter beat it out. However, the runner who started at second base rounded third base a little too far, and the first baseman made a great throw to the third baseman, who tagged him out as he dove back into the bag. I like it when there’s a play like that that may only happen once in the majors this year.