Baseball Schwag and the Discerning Five-Year Old

Last weekend we took the boys to the World Series Replica trophy day at the AT&T Park. I ran into a friend who asked me if we were going to any more Giants games this year? Reasonable enough question. I responded that we were... we have tickets in September for the back to school lunch bag giveaway game, and Jonathan is trying to get tickets for July's Buster Posey bobblehead day.

I didn't have a clue about who my San Francisco Giants were playing, or what the dates were of the actual games. But boy did we have those giveaways down. I wondered, when did baseball become about schwag?

For our first 10 years of marriage we could care less about the giveaway. We arrived fashionably on time for games, and we were never among the first 10,000 who got a Barry Bonds bobblehead. We didn't mind.

Now the boys are amassing quite a collection of San Francisco Giants schwag. Helmets from Little League day, a Pandoval bobblehead, Cepeda bobblehead and now a replica trophy... What gives?

Maybe it is nostalgia. The giveaways are for kids, and boy do Jonathan and I remember getting and saving the free stuff as a kid (of course for me it was computer show schwag in the early 80s). The boys did appreciate their trophies, and managed to sit through eight innings before we ducked out. Schwag makes it a little more fun ... hopefully it is a gateway to baseball appreciation too.