Bobbleheads Remain Kings Of Minor League Promos

While major league teams spent March tuning up for the regular season in Arizona and Florida, minor league teams were whetting their fans’ appetites by rolling out their promotional schedules.

Those slates are usually populated by things like dollar dog nights, fireworks shows, appearances from roaming entertainers like the Zooperstars or the Cowboy Monkey Rodeo, as well as all sorts of giveaways. But for the last two decades, one item has always leapt off the page: bobbleheads.

The ceramic figurines came to prominence in the minor leagues just after the turn of the century and have continued to grow and evolve with the sport. Teams have gotten more and more creative, and the results are bobbleheads that quickly go viral on social media and draw hosts of fans to the ballpark.

Alexander Global Promotions, based in Bellevue, Wash., is one of the country’s primary bobblehead makers, and they’ve seen the craze grow firsthand. Since their first piece—a Willie Mays version given out by the Giants in 1996—they’ve created more than 50 million bobbleheads and see no signs of the market slowing down.

“Bobbleheads were the first product that I saw that really made sense to me because I said, ‘Of course, someone’s going to want a small version of their favorite player,’ ” Todd Goldenberg, the national sales director for Alexander Promotions, said. “That makes sense. And they can get it for free for going to a game. I saw the future of how this could work.”

What he might not have seen, however, is the series of zany twists and turns the industry has taken over the years. Minor league promotions are a game of continual one-upmanship, and the fans get the benefits of new, unique collectibles every summer. It’s not enough for a team to have a bobblehead of Madison Bumgarner or Buster Posey; it has to have a bobblehead of the player doing something off the wall.

“It’s basically up to the teams. The teams get to be creative,” Goldenberg said. “At first, they were doing their most popular player, and then they started doing secondary players and then they started getting players who got traded, and then they started doing managers and mascots, and now they’re to the point where every minor league team has done bobbleheads.

“There are hundreds of minor league teams and they’ve all done bobblehead dolls, so now they’re coming up with more creative ideas.”

The Fresno Grizzlies (Pacific Coast), a Giants affiliate from 1998-2014, are offering bobbles of both Bumgarner and Posey this season, but with a Fresno twist. Posey is pictured with Tim Lincecum celebrating a win, and Bumgarner, a ballyhooed outdoorsman during his time away from the field, is depicted arm wrestling against a grizzly bear.

“Originally we’d discussed maybe putting him in a taco truck like we did with Tony Kemp, and then someone said, ‘Oh, we should have him doing something more Fresno-esque, like arm-wrestling a grizzly bear,” Fresno director of promotions Sam Hansen said. “And that just sort of stuck, so that’s what it’s going to be: Madison Bumgarner arm-wrestling a Fresno Grizzly.”

Long Time Coming

To get the bobbleheads ready for the season, however, promotional teams have to start brainstorming long before Opening Day. On the first day of last year’s Winter Meetings, Goldenberg estimated he and his team had already completed half of their orders for the upcoming season.

“We need to be talking five, six months before you need them,” he said. “The process starts four months before you need them.”

The process, of course, starts with an idea. A team will pitch what it wants to Goldenberg and his crew, and the two creative entities will go back and forth until they have a good sketch of what they’d like to see in a final product.

From there, the sketch is sent to Ray Caracol, Alexander Promotions’ creative director, who comes up with the final design that will go to the factory in China.That process takes a month. Then it’s another month for the factory to produce the pieces, and a third month after that for the shipment to come from overeas, clear customs and arrive in the United States.

Goldenberg said bridging the communication gap with the factory was one of the biggest challenges of the bobblehead production process. It’s not every day that someone calls up to discuss and order of 10,000 spring-loaded statues of a baseball player emerging from an egg (the Staten Island Yankees’ 2016 take on Yankees first baseman Greg Bird).

“There’s a lot of communication errors because we’re speaking English and they’re speaking Mandarin, but we’ve figured it out over the years,” Goldenberg said. “We’ve figured out a system where everybody understands what we’re doing.”

The Potomac Nationals (Carolina), who set the Internet ablaze this offseason with their Bryce Harper Gobblehead—which depicts Washington’s star outfielder as a turkey to celebrate the halfway mark to Thanksgiving—say their process for coming up with new ideas is freewheeling and goes on all season and offseason.

“We’re really always brainstorming,” said Arthur Bouvier, the team’s assistant general manager and director of stadium operations. “Something random might pop into someone’s head and we’ll throw out the idea and it kind of snowballs until we end up having a promo meeting in the offseason.”

Bouvier says the P-Nats keep an informal log of their ideas and then start to finalize a list during their promotional meetings. Once the final list is decided, the team can get to work rendering images to give to their vendor, Success Promotions, which can then begin the process of making the franchise’s ideas into a reality.

Ideally, Potomac’s ideas will go to Success Promotions in December in order to accommodate the roughly four months required to turn around the product before the season.

What’s Next?

As the years go by, minor league promotional teams will continue to wrack their brains every offseason to up the ante and keep their names in the news and on the top of trending algorithms everywhere. Coming up with new ideas for bobbleheads (and all other promotions) that make waves both locally and nationally is still job one.

“We, as a part of our marketing department, have become more like a modern ad agency,” Hansen said. “We’re doing a lot of this stuff ourselves and we’re having focus groups and we’re constantly keeping our fingers on the pulse of everything that is trending. From trending food to pop culture references, our marketing department is pretty savvy, at least with what’s going to resonate with central California . . . That’s our first priority: We try to see what’s going to resonate here first and we’ve just been lucky that the promotions we’ve put out and resonate well here can resonate well nationally.”

Even with all the innovations in the minor leagues in the 21st century, no one has found a way to beat bobbleheads.

“People always ask us, what’s the next big thing, and I always say, ‘There is no next big thing,’ ” Goldenberg said. “Bobbleheads continue to be big 20 years later.”