Isotopes will become Mariachis, Green Chile Cheeseburgers this season
ALBUQUERQUE — It’s true that baseball is a numbers game, so it’s only fitting as we approach the end of spring training and the start of a new season that Albuquerque’s Triple A franchise has got a few digits for you to chomp on. For starters: Eight, seven and two. That’s the minimum number, in order, of jerseys, caps and pants the team will wear this season. There’s jerseys for all occasions, ranging from white to red, black to gray, purple to green. Then there’s this: Four. That’s how many team names the club will go by once the 2018 Pacific Coast League season starts in just a couple of weeks.
On Tuesday afternoon before a festive atmosphere of music, applause and Mexican cuisine inside the third-floor team offices, the Albuquerque Isotopes — err, Albuquerque Green Chile Cheeseburgers, Albuquerque Dukes and, now, Mariachis de Nuevo Mexico — announced their latest marketing attack plan in partnership with Minor League Baseball.
For four home games this season, the ’Topes will change their name to Mariachis as part of MiLB’s Copa de la Diversion competition that features 33 teams from all levels changing their identities on select dates to honor baseball’s rapidly growing connection to Hispanic and Latin players and fans.
Referred to simply as the Copa Cup, the seasonlong initiative allows each team to showcase its creative genius and win fans over with a marketing and on-field promotion that rewards the top overall franchise with a traveling trophy.
In a nutshell, it’s just another way for the marketing-savvy Isotopes to do what they do best and win over fans much like they did with the time-tested Retro Night homage to the Dukes and last year’s wildly successful Cheeseburgers gimmick.
“We can’t lose sight of the other thing, too, which is our real identity,
the Isotopes, right?” Traub said. “The more things that we do, sometimes you almost lose sight of the fact that you are the Isotopes and that we’ve really relied on that for so many years and we’re changing the logo. But this is a way for us to have some fun.”
Over the years, the team also dabbled in alternative uniforms for promotions like Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and the old Negro Leagues.
Traub said the idea for the Copa Cup started last year when MiLB had four teams experiment with it. In October, the Isotopes were approached with the idea of taking part and, as Traub tells it, not all the ideas for team nicknames were agreeable.
“They had some outlandish ideas that we didn’t like so we said, ‘OK, we’re going to reel this in a little bit and get it down to what we think our fans would like,’ ” he said.
MiLB designed all the logos and uniforms. The Mariachis will stick with ’Topes’ primary colors of red and black, even mixing in the team’s iconic orbitron-A logo on the front of the white game jersey. The cap has the unique sugar skull often depicted in Dia de los Muertos celebrations, complete with an embroidered sombrero and skeletal hands. It’s a design Traub thinks will be an instant hit with fans, just as last year’s Green Chile Cheeseburgers — which will return on July 6, by the way — were.
“Once we honed in on Mariachis we were like, ‘This is it,’ ” Traub said. “There’s so much we can do with this.”
The Mariachis will take the field four times this season. The first is, fittingly, going to be May 5, along with a postgame fireworks show. Other dates are June 26, July 30 and Aug. 19 — the last being a bobblehead promotion depicting the sugar skull character on a mariachi player’s body.
The team is offering a Mariachi 4-pack ticket promotion for $56 for one box-level seat to all four games.
The Isotopes open their season on the road April 5 with a fivegame series at Salt Lake. The home opener will be April 10 at 6:35 p.m. against the Las Vegas 51s.