Think you could win these Minor League between-innings contests? Probably not
Josh Jackson
Some days, nothing comes easy.
On Friday night, the Double-A Altoona Curve celebrated the tough times with “Extreme Difficulty Night,” a promotion that tested the limits of human speed, strength, intelligence and willingness to embrace futility.
“It came from when our roving camera guy and I were walking around during a slower game,” a few years ago, explained Curve director of marketing, promotions and special events Mike Kessling. “We were just joking around we thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be so funny — if we came up with a way to make every [between-innings] game impossible to win?'”
And so, the Altoona faithful were challenged to perform such feats as naming three songs based on one note, knocking down bottle-cap-sized targets from 50 feet away with pop guns that have a 25-foot range and cleaning the second-base bag with a toothbrush in a matter of seconds.
At this ballgame, all the fans were 0-for. And they loved it.
In an industry where coming up with attention-grabbing promotions can mean negotiating complicating licensing deals ( or not), booking in-demand personalities or ordering custom-made bobbleheads, Altoona has conceived of one that involves merely tweaking things the team is already doing every game.
In essence, “Extreme Difficulty Night” converts all of the Curve’s go-to between-innings contests into absurdly hard versions of the standards.
Instead of a beat-the-clock challenge in which fans usually have to stack four cans using only one hand, on Friday they had to jump over milk crates and stack 10. Whereas there’s usually a game that tasks blindfolded fans with finding a prize hidden nearby on the field, on Friday the prize was dangling out the press box window. Blindfolds were also brought out for the mascot race, resulting in a finish-line collision between Giuseppe the Meatball and Loco (some type of furry non-meatball creature).
The trivia question — usually a multiple-choice offering about the team or something going on at the stadium — challenged a fan to name the 67th word of the Declaration of Independence without any clues.
“The guy was determined that he was going to get it,” Kessling said. “His guess was ‘of,’ and my thing was, ‘Clearly, everybody knows it’s impel.'”
The first iteration of “Extreme Difficulty Night” rolled out in 2022, and it was a success then, too, in that it generated a lot of failure among contestants and a lot of fun in the stands. But the front office staff took notes and circled back to them when they were planning this year’s promotions calendar.
“We took what we already have and dialed it up to 11,” Kessling said. “We improved upon it so much, and there were two things that we noticed. The first was when we were going down to the field each time, people were yelling, ‘How are you going to make this difficult?’ and at the end of the game, I was getting booed — laughs but boos. They were giving me a fake hard time.
“That’s what you want — it was one of the most fan-interactive games we’ve had. Everybody was so tuned in to what we were going to do between innings.”
The Curve, an affiliate of the Pirates, was once known across the Minor League landscape for “Awful Night,” a promotion dating back to 2002 in which everything was as terrible as possible, to wonderful effect. MLB.com’s Benjamin Hill, who’s been covering such wonders for going on two decades, recently named the 2007 version one of his weirdest ballpark memories. After a layoff of several seasons, Altoona brought “Awful Night” back in April this year, and the team sees that promo and “Extreme Difficulty Night” as its potential hallmark events for seasons to come.
“With the reaction we got, I told our GM, Nate Bowen, ‘We’ve got to do it again next year,’ almost like our ‘Awful Night,'” Kessling said. “We’d get a 1-2 punch with the thing the team was known for and hopefully now something new we’re also going to be known for.”
That won’t be easy to pull off, but Altoona fans appear to be game for extreme difficulty.
