Cracker Jack’s ball game days could be numbered
Take me out to the ball game. Take me out with the crowd.
Just don’t buy me some peanuts or Cracker Jack because the guy next to me might choke and never come back.
Those aren’t the lyrics we grew up singing, but they might become a familiar tune in baseball parks. Fear of peanut allergies has grown to where a minor league team is banning the dreaded nut this season.
The Hartford Yard Goats will be peanut-free, the team announced on Twitter last week.
As a famed Peanuts character might say, “Good grief.”
Baseball parks have expanded their menus to where you can now get ahi poke tacos in Oakland. You can get lobster poutine steak in Boston. You can get actual waffles from Waffle House in Atlanta.
You can even get fried grasshoppers in Seattle.
But you can’t get peanuts and Cracker Jack?
They have been part of concession lore since 1908, when “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was recorded and became a baseball staple. The tune has been played during about a billion 7th-inning stretches.
It was voted the 8th best song of the 20th Century by the Recording Industry of America. No song about fried grasshoppers even made the top 200.
Hartford is believed to be the first organization to ban peanuts and Cracker Jack. But peanut allergies have risen almost as fast as Major League salaries, so don’t be surprised if more ballparks tell Sailor Jack and his dog, Bingo, to go find another place to asphyxiate children.
It would be accidental, of course, but it could still happen.
Breathing the dust off a peanut shell or even being in the vicinity of an open jar of peanut butter can trigger an allergic reaction. Symptoms range from a runny nose to skin reactions to shortness of breath to anaphylaxis.
Precise figures on peanut-related deaths are hard to come by. Estimates range as high as 200 a year, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention list only 13 such deaths between 1996 and 2006.
But studies at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found that food allergies in children have increased at least 50 percent since the 1990s, and that about five percent of Americans have a food allergy.
There’s been a 21 percent increase in peanut allergies since 2010, according to the College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Researchers are not sure why the number has spiked, and there’s no magic bullet in sight.
That’s what prompted parents to air their allergy concerns to the Yard Goats. Now Dunkin’ Donuts Park is a peanut safe space.
“I am very serious about this being everybody’s ballpark,” General Manager Mike Abramson told NBC Connecticut. “It’s all geared around making sure that anybody who wants to come here feel like they can and are comfortable coming here.”
Is this the start of a trend?
The New York Yankees replaced Cracker Jack with the lighter, toffeeflavored Crunch ‘n Munch in 2004. Fans protested so vociferously that the Yankees quickly brought back Sailor Jack and Bingo.
But we live in more sensitive and allergy-riddled times. So what happens in Hartford might not stay in Hartford.
Take me out to the ball game. Buy me some lobster and fried grasshoppers?
That’s a sad song we might have to get used to.