I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into when I got my friend’s kids Cosmic Baseball tickets for their birthdays, but it seemed like it would be a fun time. The Tri City Chili Peppers played the newly put together Glowmojis at Coca Cola Park in Leigh Valley, PA. For the beginning of the game, it’s just a regular game, but once the sun goes down the black lights come on and everything glows. We were ready with glow sticks and glow in the dark face paint (head-to-toe paint?). A few of the Savannah Bananas and Party Animals that are no longer in Bananaland are on the teams so they were nice to see (DJ the Invader pitched!) For the most part, cosmic baseball follows standard baseball rules but they do have some tweaks: there is no bunting, the fans can overturn any umpire calls they disagree with (and Santa was one of the umps), if a batter draws a walk, they can toss the ball to themselves to hit it, after each inning in cosmic play there is a homerun derby where 1 player from each team gets 45 seconds to hit as many home runs as they can and each one counts as a run in the game. Home plate, the pitchers mound and the bases are all replaced during the intermission after the sun goes down to be UV reactive so they will glow. During the regular part of play, a fan pull a “ONE” (uno) card that had for an inning the running of the bases “reverse”, however it seemed like not many of the players remembered this so it caused a lot of confusion and chaos (and outs).
It was really cool to watch, but ended up hurting my eyes after a while. I am not sure this is something I’d go to see more than once, though if it came to say, Hartford nearby, I’d probably go to another game. I don’t think I’d travel to see it as much as I travel to see the bananas, but it was cool to see it at least once. We ended up leaving early as it was about an hour and a half from my friend’s place and was ending up being a late night, but I believe the final score was something like 14-12? Maybe? Chili Peppers won.
I definitely recommend getting in on the fun with UV face paint and/or clothing. They do sell hats and shirts that are UV reactive at the game as well, it was really cool to see how many people in the crowd were glowing during the game.
