S.O.S. — Save our SeaWolves!
Some thoughts on minor league baseball, flyover country, and John Oliver
When you live in the Midwest you’re used to being mostly ignored by “mainstream media.”1 And when the public eye does turn toward your part of the country it’s often because of a disaster or a crime or a scandal or an absurdity.2
So I was somewhat apprehensive the other day, when my phone started blowing up with friends far and wide sending me links to a story about Erie, PA, where I grew up. The comedian John Oliver had apparently put out a call to minor league baseball, offering to rebrand one of their teams:
"We are willing to use all of our resources and stupidity to give one minor league baseball team a total rebrand. We will give you a new team name. A new mascot. We will even throw you a theme night. It will be personalized and it will be bespoke." — John Oliver, “Last Week Tonight”
My hometown team, the Erie SeaWolves, a AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, had apparently “won.” I put it in quotes because it was hard to know if Erie was being honored here, or mocked. I really like John Oliver (or, at least, I had — it’s been a while since I’ve consistently watched any late night host), but his humor is often (at least in part) cruel. He pokes fun at absurdity, and my initial reaction was mostly, “Oh no, he’s just gonna use this as an opportunity to dunk on Erie.3”4
But even more than civic pride, I care because the SeaWolves mean a great deal to me. Or, more accurately, minor league baseball in Erie means a great deal to me. I grew up a block from Erie’s original minor league park, Ainsworth Field, and the summer evenings of my childhood were soundtracked by the play-by-play announcer and blasts from the stadium organ.5 The Ainsworth outfield abutted the local basketball and tennis courts, and the neighborhood kids all knew there were a few spots where we could watch the games through cracks in the outfield wall. Home run balls were retrievable in the no man’s land between the outfield wall and the chain link fence around the courts, and particularly towering shots would land on the roof of Roosevelt Middle School (it was common knowledge that Babe Ruth had once played, and homered, at Ainsworth; his shot reputedly cleared the roof entirely).
When I was in high school, the team relocated to a much nicer downtown stadium, and rebranded from the Sailors to the SeaWolves.6 I honestly cannot count the number of summer nights I spent in high school and college at the park — tickets were cheap and friends worked the concession stands, which often meant we’d get free eats (so many plans those days were guided by what was both cheap and time consuming, and the SeaWolves were both). And it didn’t hurt that some of the beer vendors weren’t always rigorous with their ID checks (which I’m sure has been rectified over time!).
Even after moving away and starting adult life in other (more expensive) cities, some of which had professional baseball teams, I usually tried to catch a game when visiting my parents. Summer nights in the ballpark were, are, and hopefully always will be, a form of magic. My kids have run across the outfield there (in a delightful ritual called the kids stampede), watched post-game fireworks, shaken hands with beloved/ terrifying mascot C Wolf, and seen future hall of famers play.7
In the past couple of seasons, the SeaWolves became legitimately good8 — they’ve won their league in back to back years. Spending my fall nights listening to the radio broadcast of their playoff games brought me right back to being 11, and hearing the play by play echo down my block as the street lights came on.
So, yes, I’m a little worried that John Oliver will shine a spotlight on Erie, and this team, and will use the moment to crack some jokes and make fun of some absurdities, and the new team identity will get tied to some sort of ridiculous pun or insult (the deal entails the team having no input on the rebrand). Whatever happens will probably just end up being a one-off gimmick night (Erie, like most minor league teams, already plays some games under various aliases — the best of which is definitely the “Pepperoni Balls”), and that’s fine. I’m sure the team, and the city, will appreciate the exposure. And heck, anything that gets even a few more tourists to town to experience the third best sunsets, and actual best AA baseball team, surely isn’t a bad thing.
Just keep your hands off C. Wolf, John Oliver!
I hate this term and all the connotations that it carries, but it does capture a certain reality. And of course the truth embodied in this sentence has all sorts of horrifying outcomes: people feel ignored by “coastal elites” and resent it, and this resentment is then exploited by the worst people in the world, who desire money and power and don’t actually care about or respect the people they claim to be the champions of. Or, as we call it, America in 2025.
And sometimes it’s to capture almost all of the above at once.
Which, to be fair, is not particularly hard to do. Erie’s claim to fame might be that it has the “world’s third best sunsets” — a vague, unsourced assertion that every Erie-ite knows and has repeated (usually with the caveat that the beautiful colors come from Cleveland’s pollution drifting down and mixing in the air in ways both unsettling and profound). It’s simultaneously amusing and somewhat heartbreaking that we can’t even claim to have the world’s second best sunsets — That would be clearly unbelievable! But maybe people would believe we were (or had once been) third best?
(But in all seriousness, the Erie sunsets are incredible — it goes down over Lake Erie, and one summer I worked a job that involved spending most evenings sitting in a shuttle van on the waterfront, and the colors truly were astounding and varied every single night.)
My other initial reaction was that Oliver, an Englishman, was going to use this as an opportunity to re-wage the War of 1812, in which — as all Erie school children know — Erie played a decisive role in America’s defeat of the British. (None of these children can explain exactly how, but all know it involves something called the Battle of Lake Erie, an American naval officer with the iconic name of Oliver Hazard Perry, the catchphrase “Don’t Give Up the Ship!” and the Flagship Niagara (a gorgeous tall ship that still anchors in Erie).)
The internet tells me the stadium didn’t actually have an organ, but something definitely played out a relentless semi-musical beat between at bats, and innings, night after night.
At the time, they were a minor league affiliate of the Pirates, so the SeaWolves moniker made sense (a sea wolf is slang for a pirate). It’s worth noting here that Oliver claimed one of the reasons Erie was chosen for the rebrand is because “the SeaWolves play nowhere near the sea,” but Erie is Pennsylvania’s only Great Lakes port city — it is literally on an inland sea!
My clearest memory of this was taking my eldest to a game to watch Bryce Harper play against Erie, back in 2011, when he was the top prospect in baseball. We went down to the outfield wall, directly above him, and I told Owen that this guy was the best player in the minor leagues. Owen was 7, so I doubt he remembers, but I do. I also saw Justin Verlander pitch back in the day, and more recently we caught Tarik Skubal, though I didn’t expect him to become the best pitcher in the world — which is another joy of minor league ball: you just don’t know where it will go, for any of these guys. They might be on their way to greater things, or this might be the pinnacle of their career; both types of players are out there together, playing this beautiful game in a medium sized city before a half interested crowd, some of whom are there cause they love baseball, some of whom are there cause they needed something different to do with their kids for a night, and some of whom are there because the one beer vendor (still) doesn’t check IDs.
A lot of the current success of the Detroit Tigers, who, as of today, have the best record in all of Major League baseball, can be traced back to players who passed through Erie on their way up. And since the Tigers are now my local team, it is very special to get out to Comerica Park and see guys I once watched in person in Erie now in the big leagues.
As the great Joe Posnanski often says, baseball truly is the best.