Inside the White Sox's immaculate theme night strategy

No ballgame experience is complete without peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Or, in Chicago, a pope hat.

At its game in August against the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago White Sox are giving away team-branded hats shaped like mitres, the ceremonial headdresses worn by religious leaders including Pope Leo XIV, who is perhaps the most famous White Sox fan alive. The hats were originally only offered to fans who bought tickets in certain sections at the Aug. 11 game, but demand was so high that the team will now give them away to everyone at the ballpark that day.

Pope Hat Night isn’t the only themed game to knock demand out of the park for the White Sox lately, according to Mike Downey, the team’s senior director of marketing and promotions. With Major League Baseball working to attract new demographics, including young people and women, the White Sox are doubling down on theme nights that also include Bravo, Hello Kitty, Pokémon Go, Fourth Wing, and Barbie to ideally turn new fans into Rate Field regulars.

“The return fan is one of the biggest challenges all MLB teams have,” Gareth Breunlin, White Sox VP of marketing and advertising, told Marketing Brew. “You get them for one game, but that return buyer, especially in the same season, is really challenging.”

Friends in high places

The pope’s status as a certified White Sox fan has been well-documented—he was photographed in a White Sox cap at the Vatican and attended Game 1 of the World Series in 2005. Naturally, that level of papal support was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the team.

“It’s really hard to comprehend how historically amazing that is,” Downey said. “This tradition that’s been passed along through history for 1,500 to 2,000 years, depending on how you interpret it, intersects with the White Sox. That’s just an incredible, crazy thing.”

The White Sox celebrated Pope Leo on multiple occasions last season, including holding a mass to honor his election and installing a plaque at his World Series seat, and Downey said he wanted to do more marketing surrounding the pope this year. His team immediately thought of doing a Pope Leo bobblehead but tragically couldn’t secure the necessary NIL rights, he said.

“Hopefully we will at some point, but I think the pope had bigger and better things to focus his time on, so I don’t blame him for that,” Downey said.

When the bobblehead idea didn’t pan out, Downey sought some divine intervention, and reached out to Father Tom Hurley, the pastor who married Downey and his wife. Downey credits Hurley with the idea of the mitre-inspired hat. The two brainstormed over text to start, then moved to email, recalled Hurley, a longtime White Sox fan who grew up on the South Side of Chicago.

They tossed around the idea of White Sox–branded chasubles, the sleeveless vestment worn by priests during mass, but Hurley said the mitre was ultimately more appropriate and recognizable for a giveaway.

The hats were announced as “special ticket offer to start to test demand,” and about quadrupled projected sales in under 24 hours, Downey said.

“I’ve been here 10 years, I’ve never seen something sell that quickly,” Downey said.

The team pivoted to a wider giveaway, with a “premium second item” to be announced for fans that originally bought the Pope Hat Night tickets. Ticket sales for that game haven’t slowed down, Downey said, and he expects a full sellout. Hurley isn’t surprised; he said he hears people around the community talk about “Bob from the South Side of Chicago” all the time.

“It’s absolutely wild to think that a guy from the South Side of Chicago, a Sox fan, is now the leader of the Roman Catholic Church,” he told us.

Outside the (batter’s) box

While Pope hHat Night may very well be the first White Sox theme night literally sanctioned by a pastor, it won’t be the first to sell out. Last season’s Barbie Game Day sold out in about three weeks without promotion, and this year’s Windy City Series Night celebrating the Chicago sports romance novels sold out shortly after the author, Liz Tomforde, posted about it, Downey said.

The White Sox also have Fourth Wing Night on the docket for Aug. 12, celebrating the best-selling fantasy romance series, with branded bomber jackets as the special ticket offer; they sold out in a week’s time, and the team doubled the order.

“Fans these days, they tend to buy [tickets in] the two to three weeks leading up to an event,” Downey said. “A lot of these theme nights that we’re doing, we’re seeing the event sell out months in advance.”

Each of the theme nights are designed with different audiences in mind—like kids and families, women, or Hispanic fans—and while theme nights have long been common in baseball, they’ve become even more targeted in the past five years or so, Breunlin said.

MLB has led the way on certain theme nights, inking leaguewide deals that allow teams to opt into themed games with properties including Fourth Wing and Bravo, and teams with “powerful brands” like the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers have also helped push the trend forward, Downey said. When major brands see success with teams like that, they’re more likely to expand their deals to others.

In addition to selling tickets, the White Sox use theme nights to build hype around the team, which is especially useful at times when they might not be performing their best on the field, Downey said. Getting new fans in the gate for enjoyable experiences in a city where they have plenty of entertainment options to choose from is another real metric for success.

“Our goal is not just a one-and-done,” Downey said. “Our goal is to get them here, show them a great time, and get them to come back to another game.”

And of course, for some fans that attend those games, there’s a chance that they could be part of history. This August, the Sox are “gonna have 40,000 fans wearing white pope hats, which probably is like a Guinness World Record,” Downey said. “You know, we probably should get them to come out, now that I think about it.”