sotto voce USA

Seeing Pink

This Sunday, while you're watching your favorite Major League Baseball team at the park or on the telly, you might see something quite unusual...pink. Major League Baseball is honoring mom on Mothers' Day and raising some money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation with a whole lotta pink. Fifty or so players will be swinging pink bats. Some will even have mom's name burned onto the Louisville Slugger label. There will be pink breast cancer awareness ribbons and logos on the players uniforms, the bases, and home plate. There'll be pink wristbands and pink lineup cards. After Sunday's games, the bats and bases will be autographed, collected, and auctioned off for the charity.

It seems that the whole idea originated with Hillerich and Bradsby. One of their subsidiaries, TPS Hockey furnished the NHL with pink hockey sticks back in March. They passed the idea along to H&B's most famous subsidiary, Louisville Slugger. Major League Baseball loved the idea and quickly approved the pink bats for use in Sunday's games; black, brown, reddish-brown and white are the only approved bat colors normally. Louisville Slugger had the lion's share of obstacles to overcome...

The bats posed something of a logistical problem for Louisville Slugger. Each player uses a different model and size, so coloring, branding and shipping them for Sunday's game has been a challenge, company spokesman Dan Burgess said.

The whole thing sounds like a great idea. Only one thing troubles me. Baseball players are a superstitious lot and there will be someone somewhere who'll go 4-for-4 with a bunch of RBIs. They'll want to use those pink bats for the rest of the year. Well, maybe that's not that big of a problem after all.

posted by fdtate @ 10:16 PM