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Benay Lopez, a 30-year-old banker from Modesto, got a nod from his wife when he announced he was sending money to the Giants to have a cardboard cutout bearing his photo installed in a seat at Oracle Park.
“The first time the conversation happened she thought I was paying $20,” Lopez said. “It went well for a while until I told her it was a hundred dollars.”
The notion that the Giants would charge fans for cutouts to “sit” in otherwise empty seats at Oracle Park for a 60-game season, played without spectators due to COVID-19 protocols, sounded like a joke at first. But 7,915 fans got the joke and ordered 13,500 cutouts, dwarfing the team’s expectations.
With the season over, 12 to 15 workers a day — volunteers from the front office — are painstakingly removing the cutouts and placing them in plastic because 4,000 fans have paid another $20 to have them shipped as a souvenir. They were attached to the backs of seats with zip ties and need to be cut carefully.
The Giants also engineered an online charity auction of about 320 cutouts of celebrities, former Giants, current players and their families, and even Pixar characters and the ubiquitous seagulls that invade Oracle Park each game searching for snacks.
Most of the cutouts were placed in Oracle’s lower deck, creating a sea of smiling faces that even Giants players praised. They said the cutouts and piped-in crowd noise made the 32 home games seem more normal.
In years to come, the odd cutout phenomenon will be told as part of the strange story of sports in a pandemic.
“What might have initially started off as, ‘Hey, how is this going to be perceived?’ became a creative competition among teams to enhance an experience that in your wildest dreams you never thought would occur,” said Tim Mead, the president of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
“I think from the perspective of playing games we never would have imagined without fans, what it meant for players to see something in the stands, it created conversation in the media and a topic for fans watching the games. It also brought a level of humor to the broadcasts.”
The Hall has asked some teams to send cutouts to be displayed in the Today’s Game section of the museum. One will belong to pitcher Gaylord Perry, a Hall of Famer who played for the Giants, who asked that his cutout be sent to the Hall.
It was removed from the Giants’ auction, as was a cutout of Willie Mays with his dog, which the club plans to keep for its archives.
The cutout idea caught on throughout Major League Baseball. Broadcasts showed cutouts at almost all of the 30 stadiums. While the league did not keep track of how many populated each ballpark, television images showed the 13,898 dwarfed what other teams did. That represents more than one-quarter of Oracle’s seating capacity.
The A’s also had cutouts and have filled shipper orders for 4,500. They say they are holding 5,000 more for in-person pickup when pandemic protocols allow. Some Oakland cutouts went on a road trip, landing in seats at Dodger Stadium, where the A’s played a neutral-site Division Series against the Astros.
The Giants were among the first to announce the program, borrowing the idea from European soccer clubs.
“I still remember a meeting where a bunch of us were on a call and talking about how we were going to gauge fan interest and we talked about the cutouts,” said Mario Alioto, the Giants’ executive vice president business operations.
“Some of us weren’t sure it was the right thing to do. Frankly, we thought we’d maybe do 2,000 to 3,000 of them. But every day we got these reports and couldn’t believe the interest.”
Season-ticket holders who let the Giants keep their 2020 ticket refunds to apply to 2021 plans got the cutouts for free. Other season-ticket holders and casual fans had to pay $99 apiece.
The Giants went through five rounds of orders. They were still making sales ahead of the final seven-game homestand in September.
The marketing team enlisted 43 people from all departments, including baseball analytics, the ticket office and information technology, to process orders and approve the photos the fans supplied, which Giants officials took seriously.
One European soccer club unwittingly created and displayed a cutout of Osama bin Laden. The Giants did not want to make the same mistake.
Pets were OK. Alioto said when he did removal duty Wednesday he processed an order for three cutouts from one customer, all of them dogs.
The Giants hired an outside design firm to turn the fan-submitted photos into digital silhouettes that a contract printing company affixed to the cardboard. They proved to be sturdy.
Left fielder Alex Dickerson, annoyed that he had to chase foul balls because the club had no Ball Dudes and Dudettes, started firing them at the front-row cutouts, which a lot of fans found funny. A’s third baseman Matt Chapman did likewise until his season ended prematurely with a hip injury.
Giants vice president of marketing and advertising Danny Dann tied the overwhelming demand for cutouts to the fans’ desire to be part of the 2020 season in whatever way they could short of coming to the park, plus the demand for some form of memorabilia from the unique season.
“I can tell you, from an operational standpoint, we were overwhelmed,” Dann said.
One order came from Erin Blackwood, a 50-year-old San Franciscan who works in science education at San Francisco State. She did have to talk herself into spending the $99.
“I figured it’s actually cheaper than going to the number of games I’d have gone to,” she said. “Obviously it’s not the same as sitting there at the stadium, but I felt my presence would be there and at some point I hoped to see my cutout on TV. But it was not in a place where the camera ever saw it.”
Blackwood picked her spot in Section 123, down the left-field line, for a reason.
“Because it was closer to the Chris Isaak cutout.”
Blackwood and Lopez, the fan from Modesto, both planned to spend the $20 shipping fee to have their cutouts delivered.
Blackwood plans to display hers alongside a Brandon Crawford banner in her hallway. Lopez will stick his in his front window.
In the first week of the celebrity cutout auction, Will Clark fetched the most cash for the Giants Community Fund. His cutout sold for $2,300. The next-highest was the late Hall of Famer Willie McCovey at $1,400. The top-selling celebrity was San Francisco native Bruce Lee, the late martial artist and film star, whose cutout sold for $1,100.
Among the many still on auction as of Thursday were Isaak ($115), chef Guy Fieri ($150) and 49ers tight end George Kittle ($260).
The A’s are holding a similar auction and say they have raised $5,000 to benefit their community fund.
The Giants will have a few thousand cutouts left of fans who chose not to have them shipped. They will not be destroyed and might even remain in their seats because they might be needed again.
Nobody can yet say whether fans will be allowed into Oracle for the start of next season.
Said Dann, “We may have cutouts in 2021.”
Chronicle staff writer Matt Kawahara contributed to this report.
Henry Schulman covers the Giants for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: hschulman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hankschulman
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October 31, 2020 at 01:25AM
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For Giants and MLB, fan cutouts went from a joke to a treasured piece of history - San Francisco Chronicle
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