[Sport] Minor league team’s ‘Springsteen’ Night is a ‘shore’ thing in New Jersey

[Lunix I]

Going to Minor League Baseball games is about so much more than the nine innings of action. Sure, the possibility of watching a future star might be enough to get locals to games, but teams run countless promotions to fill their stadiums.

In Lakewood, NJ, that involves rock ‘n’ roll-themed games to honor great bands.

The Lakewood BlueClaws started a tradition 11 years ago by paying homage to Bruce Springsteen. For one game each season, everything is about The Boss -- from the jerseys to the music played at the ballpark to in-game contests.

It’s aptly called BruceClaws Night.

Springsteen is originally from Freehold, N.J. and currently resides in Rumson, about 30 miles from the BlueClaws’ park. That local connection gave one former BlueClaws employee, Hal Hansen -- who’s now with the Somerset Patriots -- the idea to honor Springsteen one night a year.

“That was kind of my brainchild and all of the details that went into it,” Hansen told OSDB Sports. “It was driven more so because he is the guy at the Jersey Shore. … He has ties all over the place – playing in Asbury Park, making appearances at all kinds of different places.

“He is the Jersey Shore’s son and I just felt we needed to honor him. We were the minor league baseball team down there and the world of Minor League Baseball has the freedom and flexibility to do kind of whatever we wanted and it just seemed painfully obvious that we needed to do a Bruce Springsteen night where everything about it was dedicated to him.”

The team didn’t just recognize Springsteen by playing his hits and holding trivia contests. The BlueClaws went the whole nine yards, going as far as to rename the team. Instead of playing as the BlueClaws, they donned “BruceClaws” across their chests in tribute that one evening a season.

Thanks to the help from the team’s designer, jerseys were made to honor Springsteen’s discography. Each year, the BlueClaws would wear a jersey paying homage to one of The Boss’ albums.

“We had custom jerseys made and each year, I tried to take the artwork from one of his album covers and convert it into a jersey so we’d work with our designer,” Hansen said. “We had a jersey that looked like ‘The River’ album cover, had one that looked like ‘The Rising.’ We kind of played off of his history.”

To kick off the night, the team brought in a cover band to play Springsteen’s hits and get the fans fired up. One year, Hansen said the band played the entire “Born To Run” album from start to finish, which drew a “huge crowd.”

And during the game, it was all Bruce, all the time.

“The only music played throughout the entire game was Bruce Springsteen with the exception of the national anthem, ‘Happy Birthday,’ which we sang to whatever kids we had in attendance, and ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame,’” he said. “Every other song – including walk-ups, between-inning songs – were Bruce Springsteen.“We didn’t repeat any songs, other than the batters’ walk-ups. We started the game with his early work and by the time we finished, we were playing the most recent music he recorded, so we went in chronological order as the innings progressed, so it was really cool.”

Players had fun with the Bruce-themed night, too. Being as young as many of them are, some weren’t as familiar with Springsteen’s music as others.The coaching staff, Hansen said, was “more into it than the players were” – which is to be expected.

“I don’t know how many of the players really even – we have guys who are 19, 20 years old from the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico or Venezuela, wherever they might be from, and they’re probably not all that familiar with Springsteen,” Hansen said. “But in the spirit of what we were trying to do, they obviously all went along with it. Maybe Bruce gained a few fans, some 20-something-year-old minor league baseball players.”