New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner addresses media about his latest sexting issues. (Getty Images)
If you don’t have better plans, consider taking a trip down to Richmond tonight and buying a ticket to see the Richmond Flying Squirrels take on the Portland Sea Dogs. And just why should you check out the AA-level affiliate of the San Francisco Giants when there’s a perfectly mediocre major league team here in D.C. to lament?
Well, for one thing, the Squirrels have a great promotion tonight. Fans at tonight’s game can enjoy $1 hot dogs all night. The occasion? A certain New York City mayoral candidate whose social media activities and anatomically appropriate last name just can’t stop poking the tabloid pages.
But Anthony Weiner is just one of several disgraced figures being honored tonight by the Squirrels. “Somebody said, ‘there’s a lot of scandals in the world and a lot of them made you laugh because they’re so crazy’,” Todd Parnell the team’s chief operating officer, recalls about a team retreat after the 2012 season.
And Parnelly, who goes by “Parney,” says that the Squirrels tonight will be plumbing the scandalous archives. In addition to the Weiner promotion, there will also be mid-game stunts commemorating the early-1990s fraudulent pop act Milli Vanilli, featuring a lip-synching contest; a Watergate “water relay,” complete with a Richard Nixon impersonator screaming “I am innocent!”; and a tribute to the 1919 Chicago White Sox—known as the Black Sox for their throwing of that year’s World Series—with a barefoot actor portraying Shoeless Joe Jackson.
“We’ll have a good crowd,” Parnell says. “We’ll show we’re creative. We like to have fun. We like to laugh at ourselves, and sometimes we laugh at others.”
Not every scandal made the cut, though. The Squirrels will not be acknowledging the recent gift scandal that has ensnared Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Not even the obvious hilarity of the governor’s recent decampment to Afghanistan as he announced he would return gifts given to him by the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company will be featured, possibly out of caution against upsetting McDonnell.
“The governor comes out to games”—one or two a season—”and he follows us pretty closely,” Parnell says. “That’s a little close to home.”
And a putting contest in tribute to frisky golfer Tiger Woods was also snipped. “We’re a family business,” Parnell says.
Still, involving Weiner was unavoidable. “It’s a perfect last name to do something with $1 hot dog night,” Parnell says.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misreported the team’s name. They are the Richmond Flying Squirrels, not Richmond Squirrels.
