The San-Fran Giants Will Put a Cardboard Cutout of You in the Stands
And it’ll only cost you $99.
Major League Baseball has been wracking its collective brain as to how they can get the league in gear while the COVID-19 pandemic makes things a lot less safer for both players and fans. Player and staff testing has been increased for numerous teams (which has turned up a not-insignificant number of new cases), but after a lot of warring over safety and payment, the league and player union did recently come to an agreement to hold a 60-game season starting in July.
However, there’s still a problem: it’s still not safe to have a giant stadium’s worth of fans huddled together in the stands, potentially spreading the virus. The San Francisco Giants have a solution, at least for a given degree of “solution:” fill the stands with cardboard cutouts. In a letter sent to all season ticket holders, the Giants invited fans to send in images of themselves, which will be turned into cardboard cutouts and placed in the stands of Oracle Park during games. If you don’t hold a season ticket, you can still get in on this with a $99 buy-in. This mildly silly program, aptly named the “Giants Fan Cutout Program,” is billed as allowing fans to “be at Oracle Park even when you’re home watching the game.”
The Giants aren’t the first team to try this; various teams from various other sports around the world have been stacking the stands with cardboard cutouts to make the stadium feel a little more alive, though this has led to some bad-taste pranks like when Leeds United discovered a cardboard cutout of Osama bin Laden. Honestly, if you’re gonna submit a joke picture for a cutout, why not someone cool? I’d submit a picture of Tom Selleck, personally.
The MLB training camp is set to begin on July 1, with the season beginning on either July 23 or 24, assuming no new catastrophic disasters manifest.