This is “Hot Dogs From Heaven.”
“It’s just nothing but joy. It’s absolute happiness for 90 seconds,” Tyler Thompson, the Mariners’ senior manager of experiential marketing and game entertainment, said of the spectacle. “What could be better, especially in a ballpark, than hot dogs falling from the sky?”
(Frustrated fans might ask for a few more timely hits, but alas, we digress.)
The idea was formed last fall, when Hempler’s Foods — the Mariners’ Ferndale-based supplier of frankfurters — requested an attention-grabbing in-game promotion. A team comprising Thompson, vice president of fan experience Malcolm Rogel and coordinator of in-game entertainment Nick Sybouts proceeded to make pigs fly.
(Or cows. Or dogs. You get the point.)
According to Thompson, the name came first. But though frankfurters have long been fired out of bazookas and cannons at baseball games, it required more advanced physics (and early failures) to make them float.
“As early as November we were buying parachutes from Amazon and adhering them to hot dogs and dropping them into an empty ballpark,” said Thompson, who tested the parachutes with water bottles as well. “We learned a lot about weight distribution and parachute size and how those two things work together. The first couple we dropped were like heat-seeking missiles down from the 300 level. We thought, ‘OK, that’s not going to work.’ ”