What the Macon Bacon are cooking up for season two
By Ryan Weaver
In baseball, the break in play between half innings in the time to get up to get a drink or some food. This isn’t the case at Luther Williams Field, the home of the Macon Bacon. During these games, the time between innings is when the music starts going and Kevin Bacon — the mascot not the actor — comes onto the field making his way over to the umpires. The crowd are all out their seats and cheering the umps to join Kevin, when the mascot throws a boa necklace around their necks and they all start to bop to the music.
As the May 30 opening day nears for the Bacon, they are finishing up their final preparations and implementing the changes for year two. A number of those changes are fan driven.
A big emphasis has been put on the entertainment that Kevin and the fans can join in on.
“We probably added about 15 to 20 new skits this year along with updates to last year’s…that people liked,” said Tyler Vertin, director of marketing. “So just adding variety and new skits to it that’s a big thing for entertainment.”
The skits are the focus for the changes in entertainment. Vertin said these are what the fans see most and the area that needed “more variety” and new skits to “mix” in going into year two.
“It’s kind of hard to come up with that many skits [the fans] seeing 26 games and nine innings and you know two skits per innings. It’s a lot that adds up,” Vertin said. “But being able to…get some variety that’s the way to do it.”
Aside from the baseball, the entertainment is big for the team. Minor league and semi-pro teams don’t have the big fan followings and natural draw that Major League Baseball teams do, so they use entertainment and theme nights to draw in attendees.
“You can kind of tell like on non-theme nights you have a little bit of a smaller crowd but I think having something that you know interests fans like Star Wars or fireworks or whatever that usually ends up drawing a bigger crowd,” said Sarah Leo, the director of partnership activation and entertainment for the Bacon.
The correlation between theme nights and crowd size is reflected in the Bacon’s own home schedule. They play 25 games at home, only six of those games don’t have any kind of theme planned.
Some theme nights are simple with fireworks or happy hour, other themes are more detailed like a new “Macon Peaches” event, where the team will wear throwback jersey to the days where Macon baseball was an affiliate of the Detroit Tigers.
The biggest events Leo said from last year were Star Wars night and The Allman Brothers Band night. Both games were eventually rained out, but had the biggest ticket draws of any other home game. Allman Brothers night is special to Macon with Leo saying it connects to “Macon’s heritage” with the band’s ties to the city.
There are a few more changes coming to the park that are unrelated to theme nights or Kevin Bacon. Nick Green is the new director of food and beverage and he studied fan surveys for requested changes.
“Basically, we got some survey results [and] I got them sent over to me when I first started here…but this is how we’re going to take into account what the fans said,” Green said.
One request includes the addition of cheeseburgers to the all-you-can-eat ticket deal. The biggest change comes from the team’s own namesake: bacon.
“A big thing that was talked about this year was…adding bacon into the menu. So, we are doing that in a lot of different ways,” said Green.
Another change planned by Vertin is the addition of some trivia games during inning breaks.
“We are going to [have] the P.A. announcer announcing like a couple events where we’re having someone…read off lyrics and then be like, ‘Is this a country song or is it just made up or is this hip pop song or is it not,’” Vertin said.
