Josh Laird always wanted to go to an Altoona Curve game. So when the date of Friday, June 9 opened up for him, he checked the schedule on the Curve’s website – and saw that the minor league baseball team was giving away bobbleheads as part of Will Ferrell Tribute Night. “I just thought my kids would think it was cool,” says Laird, who made the two-hour trek from Fairfield, PA, with his two children and stood in line for an hour. “It was an added bonus for them to have something from the game.”

Laird joined hundreds of Curve fans who arrived early to receive that day’s giveaway: a bobblehead of recent stud prospect Josh Bell. But the current Pittsburgh Pirates player wasn’t wearing a baseball uniform or swinging a bat. Instead, the bobblehead featured Bell in a deep V-neck, jeans and aviator shades, gleefully about to strike a handheld musical instrument. The text across the bottom: I Gotta Have More Josh Cow-Bell.

In the wide, wacky world of minor league promotions, bobbleheads still move the needle for fans. But as evidenced by their homage to Ferrell’s iconic “Saturday Night Live” skit, the Curve are hitting home runs with a winning bobblehead formula: a decorated former prospect (or team mascot) married to a fun and exciting theme.

Photo Gallery

Cousins Case Ruby, 13 and Hunter Streightiff, 11, were disappointed to receive a Will Ferrell bobblehead … until they found out that it was really baseball player Josh Bell.

The Altoona Curve love creative bobbleheads. This “More Cowbell” version of former prospect Josh Bell was created for the team’s Will Ferrell Tribute Night.

As customary, Alexander Global Promotions (asi/116710) creates a “Mud Mold” prototype for teams to approve before the final product.

Curve players got “Ferrelled” for their at-bats.

Isaiah Arpino (center), the team’s director of promotions and entertainment, helps hand out the day’s bobblehead giveaway to the first 1,500 fans.

It wasn’t all Will Ferrell shenanigans. Before the game, the Curve also honored local little league teams. And oh by the way, there’s a roller coaster adjacent to the field.

The added bonus: as the Double-A affiliate of the nearby Pirates, the Curve have a wealth of former prospects to recognize, thanks to the big league team’s remarkable cultivation of homegrown talent. So during this past offseason when the team fleshed out its promotional ideas for the coming season, it brainstormed a bobblehead for Bell, who played for the team in 2014. “We threw a ton of ideas around,” says Isaiah Arpino, the team’s director of promotions and entertainment. They liked the idea of incorporating a bell, and briefly toyed with the idea of a sleigh bell for a Christmas in July theme. “And then I don’t know who said it, but someone brought up the Will Ferrell skit from SNL, and that stuck,” Arpino recalls. “Everybody had that look on their face, ‘Oh, okay, that makes sense.’”

From that seed of an idea, the Curve had months to fully grow a promotional idea with two sizable branches: a bobblehead and a whole theme night dedicated to Ferrell’s comedic genius.

For the bobblehead, they contacted Brian Sloan of Alexander Global Promotions (asi/116710), the Curve’s go-to vendor. In detail and with images, the Curve’s marketing staff specifically outlined the look, pose and clothes they wanted – even the wooden floor of the skit’s recording studio. “It’s those little details that make everything,” says Mike Kessling, the Curve’s director of marketing & special events.

The steps that follow: Alexander Global sends a powerpoint highlighting every detail of the bobblehead (hair, skin color, facial expression and much more). A pre-paint “mud mold” is created for the team to approve. Paint colors come next, followed by decals that are applied with water (which offer more flexibility than carved logos.)

The process may be standard, but the hand-carved and -painted creations are anything but. “The teams really push us to do new and different things,” says Sloan, a 23-year veteran of minor league baseball front offices before he joined Alexander Global in 2014 as director of business development. “That’s what exciting every day, when it’s different.”

Theme nights are nothing new for the Curve; the team’s greatest work dates back over a decade when it launched “Awful Night”, a salute to all things terrible that included stats like Failure Averages and playing bad music. For Will Ferrell Tribute Night, Arpino, Kessling and the Curve’s staff finalize the particulars about two weeks before the game. There’s the scoreboard graphics (player headshots given the Step Brothers and Talladega Nights treatments), on-field contests (like the Cow Bell Shuffle), even the Elf outfit that the on-field emcee will wear for the night. (Walking around the stadium, Kessling stuck to his civvies after seeing the costly suit price tag to go full-on Ron Burgundy.)

The Curve maintain a reputation for being one of the more creative teams in the minors, but Trey Wilson, the team’s director of communications & broadcasting, cites 2015 as a year when the team “turned a corner” promotionally, with inspired events like a salute to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and several creative bobbleheads.

“This was a franchise that always had a reputation of doing different things, not recycling the same ideas over and over again,” says Wilson, who handles the team’s radio duties among multiple other responsibilities. “That year, with the promotional giveaways and theme nights, we took it to a whole ’nother level.” It contributed to a 5% attendance bump as well a nomination that year for the minor leagues’ top overall franchise.

While the theme nights and giveaways are designed to draw in casual fans, the lines can blur and hit both demographics. Take cousins Case Ruby, 13 and Hunter Streightiff, 11, who like to go to a Curve game once a year whenever Streightiff visits from out-of-state. “We thought it was a Will Ferrell bobblehead, so I wasn’t that excited,” says Ruby.

“And then when we found out it was Josh Bell,” adds Steightiff, “we were just like …” At this point, Steightiff takes a deep breath and gets very still, as if he can only suppress the excitement for so long before he blurts out, “We want it, we want it!”

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