Minor League Baseball Team Will Have Manti Te’o Girlfriend Bobblehead Night

Well, we guess it was inevitable that something like this would happen. The Florence Freedom, a minor league baseball team based in Florence, Kentucky, have announced that they will host Manti Te’o Girlfriend Bobblehead Night on May 23rd, 2013.  Te’o, of course, is the Notre Dame football player who is either the victim of, or a participant in, a hoax in which he had an online girlfriend named Lennay Kekua who tragically died the same day his real life grandmother died.  The thing is, the Lennay  never existed, and the picture of her was lifted from some other randomly selected woman’s Facebook page without her knowledge or consent.

The details of this mess are still coming out and it may be a while before we have the last word on what Te’o knew, and when did he know it, but the owners of the Freedom are capitalizing on the event already  The Freedom are a member of the independent Frontier League.  Owners of these independent league teams need to be one part baseball people and one part carnival barker in order to come up with creative ways to put enough fannies in the ballpark seats to pay the bills.

So, how does one create a bobblehead of a nonexistent person?    Well, the boxes that will be given away will be empty.  As the team announced on its website:

Yes Freedom fans, the boxes will be empty.  But that’s where fan imagination can run wild and individual unique stories about what the bobblehead should really look like can begin.

To add to the imaginary fun, section 115 will be blocked and reserved only for fans to sit with their imaginary friends, girlfriends/boyfriends or spouses.  There will also be a make pretend kiss cam, air guitar contest and an imaginary food fight outside the Airheads Kids Zone.

At the risk of sounding old fashioned, we remember when if one had a girlfriend, one had at least met her and spent some time with her (these events were called “dates” and if the two hit it off the “dates” were “fun”) before she was officially considered to be a girlfriend.  We realize that social media has changed a lot of things, but come on now, this is ridiculous.