Minor League Teams Serving Up Donut Burgers, Eating Olympics, $1 Beers To Draw In Fans

Unique promotions are a way of life in minor league baseball.

Other than the chance to see possible-future-major leaguers, minor league teams use promotions – particularly food-related promotions – to draw in fans.

The El Paso Diablos have 25 cent hot dogs and ice cream sandwiches on Sundays, $1 beer Thirsty Thursdays, and $3 Bud Light and Mexican entree on select game dates.

Those food promotions seem tame to compared to what the Lake County Captains in Ohio recently did with the nine-course eating Olympics. By inning, competitors had to eat: 1 – One George’s Gyro; 2 – Four Twinkies; 3 – Two Chic-fil-A sandwiches, one of them spicy; 4 – One can of Spam; 5 – Four hot wings; 6 – One Fritos pie; 7 – Half-pound hot dog eating contest; 8 – Two pieces of pizza; 9 – One banana split. Read more about the competition here.

The eating contest ended with a showdown between George Lianopolous of Euclid and Mark Ogrizek of Wadsworth in the ninth inning with only a banana split left between an epic stomachache and a stomachache topped with a victory.

Ogrizek won the competition when Lianopolous split from the desert and headed for the nearest garbage can.

Long before KFC introduced the Double Down, the Gateway Grizzlies tested the bounds of what a snack could – or should- be. The Grizzlies, who play just outside St. Louis, serve up a bacon cheeseburger between two Krispy Kreme donuts.

Tampering with the burger is discouraged.

“You’re ruining it! You’re not supposed to put ketchup on it!” CBS News Correspondent Cynthia Bowers said to a diner in a CBS News report.

“Well, I don’t know. It’s my first time,” he replies.

The burger packs up to 1,000 calories with the donut containing 10 grams of sugar. It still wasn’t enough to faze diabetic diner Floyd Schuetz.

“Oh, I’ll have another one of these,” he said in the CBS News report.

The burger earned special recognition this year when it ranked 72nd out of 101 in the Travel Channel?s Chowdown Countdown.

?We are extremely proud of the product that we have put out there,? Grizzlies General Manager Steve Gomric said in a news release. ?We take pride in our concessions items at GCS Ballpark and are thrilled that Baseball?s Best Burger is still being recognized five years later.?