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Henry’s Random Thoughts
2008 Cincinnati Reds SGA Bobbleheads
Brandon Phillips 30/30 Dual Bobblehead
A sellout crowd of over 42,000 packed into GABP on May 17 to watch the Reds beat the Indians on an Adam Dunn walkoff homer. The first 30,000 received one of these bobbles. It was the first time in several years that the team gave away fewer than 40,000 of them. Since they have been giving them away on Wednesdays recently, and the crowds have been about 30,000 for the games, I’m not sure it was their intent to leave people empty-handed. One person probably decided to cut the order, and someone else might have decided to move the game to Saturday. Either way, I hope all the people who missed this one were Indians fans.
Another factor hindering tightwad bobble collectors was that this was a premier game, meaning ticket prices were higher. Also, it was part of the Opening Day ticket pack, meaning the bleacher seats were unavailable in single-game form. For Joe Fan, the cheapest he could do was a $19 view level seat. Hours before game time, they sold some $12 standing room tickets, but I’m sure most people had broken down and bought their tickets by then.
Joe Nuxhall Replica Statue
Tuesday June 10th
saw the team defeated by the St. Louis Cardinals in front of 34,000 fans after
an emotional ceremony to honor local hero, pitcher and broadcaster Joe Nuxhall,
who died in late 2007. The first 30,000 got an item that while it was not a
bobble, belongs in the bobble family for sure. It was a small bronze replica of
the statue of Joe that stands outside Great American Ballpark. It is very well
done, and the fact that something like this can be given away is testament to
how good modern life really is. We got some extras for Ebay listing, and they
sold a lot quicker than we expected, thanks to the quality of the item, and
“The Hamilton Assassin’s” incredible popularity.
Amazingly, I got to meet Tom
Tsuchiya, the noted sculptor responsible for the Nuxhall
statue, as well as some of the other player statues in front of GABP. I told
him how much I liked the big statues, and I mentioned that I had the little
one. The one thing he told me is that the smaller one is not quite a perfect
scale model of the bigger one. Apparently, there was something in the structure
of the bigger one that just couldn’t be shrunken down for the giveaway. Interesting.
Adam Dunn 80’s Themed Bobblehead
This one was a bit of a head-scratcher to me. After several years of being in somewhat of a rut with bobbles, most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Barry Larkin, as well as both Marty and Joe, have all been honored twice, in spite of 139 years of baseball history here and a lot of uncovered ground. I figured this Adam Dunn one would be the same deal, a repeat of the 2002 Dunn, perhaps with a different uniform. I was way off.
What we have is Adam Dunn
dressed like Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett character from Miami Vice. This is
about as different as you can get from the Reds SGAs. The bobble was given out
on July 26, a Saturday night. The crowd was about average for a Saturday game.
It was somewhere around 34,000 present to watch them fall to the Rockies in the
midst of a five-game skid. It was part of an 80’s-themed weekend. Why they
chose Adam Dunn to grace the bobble is beyond me. He was 10 when the 80’s
ended, but maybe he has some nostalgia for the 80s and volunteered to have his
likeness dressed up like this.
Fans got a little unexpected
drama at this game, as radio broadcaster Jeff Brantley laid into Ken Griffey
Jr. for dogging it in the field. Word got back to the rabbit-eared Junior, who
hit one of his last homers as a Red later on that night, and after crossing
home, made a throat-slashing gesture at Brantley in the announcer’s booth and
shouted profanities at him. He was traded the following Thursday. This will be
some Reds fans’ last memory of Junior, which is a shame. Not only is Junior not
a thug, he is in fact a very decent person. While he will always be a scapegoat
for the team’s failure to win, the team’s problems go way beyond anything he
did.
Whether this bobble becomes popular will depend on how many collectors will be nostalgic for the 80s. Younger collectors don’t even remember the decade, and Boomers may not care for it. I grew up in the 80s and this one suits me just fine.
On a lighter note, my cousin
scheduled his wedding the night of this giveaway, meaning I had to grab the
bobbles and run from this game. I can’t believe he didn’t check the Reds’
schedule before planning the big day. The only thing worse would have been
having the thing during the Super Bowl.
Tom “Mr. Perfect” Browning Bobblehead
September 16 saw the team
beat the Cardinals on a strong outing by Bronson Arroyo, on the 20th
anniversary of Tom Browning’s perfect game. Browning was an excellent pitcher
and a popular guy who managed a .577 win percentage, a 20 win season and a
World Series ring in his relatively short career. He was a mainstay of the
Rose/Pinella era of Reds Baseball.
This one was the first one
sponsored by Chiquita, a Cincinnati business icon controlled by former Reds
owner Carl Lindner.
This one saw a crowd of
around 20,000, the smallest crowd ever to turn out for a bobblehead night. I’m
sure one factor was that they have never had one this late in what has been a
futile run of seasons, but another factor was the fact that the entire area had
suffered a massive power outage, and at the time of the game, only about 50% of
the people had electricity. Notice the patch for the 1988 All-Star game on his
shoulder, commemorating the last such game in Cincinnati.
