Major League Baseball 2013: bobbleheads and fireworks galore for fans

9. Calling all women

COURTESY OF THE ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS
Lady's handbag wit Arizona Diamondbacks logo.

Ladies Day at big-league games date back to the late 1800s, and even though a bit old-timey by today’s standards, baseball still woos female fans. Washington, Philadelphia, and the Chicago White Sox are among teams with Ladies Nights, and the White Sox also have a Mother-Son Night, with specially priced tickets.

The St. Louis Cardinals hold a Ladies Weekend with pregame entertainment, activities, and giveaway items all selected with females in mind. 

Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Kansas City encourage leaving the men at home with Girls Night Out games.

For the needle-and-thread enthusiasts, a handful of teams, including the Mets, Diamondbacks, and Brewers, hold Stitch N Pitch games in which fans who love to knit, crochet, quilt, or cross-stitch sit together in discounted seats and, in some cases, get expert help and view samples from local craft shops.  

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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