Baseball + Guinea Pigs = Promotional Gold for Disney

As Grandad use to say, "There ain't nothin' that goes together like baseball and guinea pigs!" Of course, Grandad suffered from a traumatic brain injury. And he wasn't actually my grandfather. But that's a story for another time.

THR reports that Major League Baseball has unveiled "its most comprehensive promotional sponsorship arrangement with a movie to date" -- a possible million free tickets to the Walt Disney Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer 3-D comedy G-Force, slated to open July 24.

The promotion goes like this: If a player hits a grand slam at the All-Star game on July 14, free opening-day tickets to see G-Force will be sent to the first one million people who register at Disney.com starting this Wednesday.

The idea is pretty brilliant, actually. Disney gets a few million new hits to their website, and then if a grand slam is hit, all of those million people who get a free ticket will buy extra tickets and bring their kids to see G-Force on opening weekend, thus creating a guarantee of X many butts in seats. Presumably, MLB is hoping that the desire to see a grand slam hit will lure those million households to follow the All-Star game, which is in itself merely a promotional gimmick for Major League Baseball.

MLB says that grand slams have been hit "well above the normal pace" so far this season, although that's no guarantee that one will be hit during the All-Star game. For those not schooled in the intricacies of Our Nation's Past-time, a grand slam is a home run hit when the bases are full, this scoring four runs. Impressive.

But rare. Grand slams are, understandably, not a common occurrence, and odds favor it not happening during the All-Star game, unless it's engineered by MLB in advance. And we would never, ever suggest that the powers-that-be at Disney and Major League Baseball would deliberately monkey with an exhibition game that, by it's very nature, has nothing to do with overall league stats [EDIT: A reader comments that the winning league gets home field
advantage in the world series, for what that's worth] just to pull off a multi-million dollar joint promotion. Because that would be wrong.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with G-Force? The 3-D animated feature, about a group of talking guinea pigs who undergo secret spy missions for the government, doesn't appear to have a whit of baseball in the entire plot. Yet the G-Force guinea pigs will appear on every one of the 20 million All-Star ballots distributed at 30 ballparks, and MLB clubs will host "G-Force Days" with ticket, trading-card and prize giveaways tied to the film.

Perhaps the significance is that baseball fans are, themselves, being used as guinea pigs by the marketing arms of MLB and Disney, test subjects in a promotional experiment to find out just how much advertising for something that has no connection whatsoever to the event promoting it people can stand before turning on Major League Baseball entirely. Although it's not much of an experiment -- sports fans have been the target audience for nonsensical marketing for years, yet they still keep buying tickets.