The Milwaukee Brewers used their commercial time between innings to talk about the charitable arm of the organization on Tuesday nights broadcast.  Instead of selling the ad time FOX Sports Wisconsin donated the ad time, and the team used it to talk about the foundation which gives to educational and health causes and to organizations involved with children’s physical fitness.  The foundation currently has no endowment, but the team is running an auction to raise money to create one.  Additionally, team owner Mark Attanasio donated $100,000 to the foundation this year.

While baseball, with its breaks between innings, naturally lends itself to commercial, the team’s use of this time was a unique use of that space- working to promote the positive things the team is involved in.  With so much talk in the last 48 hours about the brawl and the messages being sent to kids about fighting, the Brewers should be praised for putting their community efforts front and center.  What is the business of baseball?  It is the business of raising the communities profile.  This Richard Sandomir piece has some more details.

And while we are talking about interesting things teams are doing, the Pirates earlier this month began making it easier for fans to buy their tickets online or on the phone.  How many times have you shopped for tickets, found the best ones you could afford, then went to checkout to find there was a fee that made the tickets $10 more than you thought.  Well the Pittsburgh Pirates are fixing that for the rest of the season. Buy Pirates tickets before August 15 and the team will pay your fees. Finally, someone has taken a look at what it really costs to go to a game.

Here is a questions for you- if a team made parking free on a particular night of the week- would that change your plans to go to a game?