When Reds pitcher Luis Cessa moved from the Reds’ bullpen to their rotation last August, he understood his job was changing, with a new strategy and approach and routine. But he was caught off guard by one of the byproducts. The switch meant he was about to spend a lot more time in the dugout. And that meant he was about to spend a lot more time considering potential home-run celebrations.
Cessa took his time. (After all: No one wants to introduce something new in September.) He was particularly struck by Reds first baseman Jake Fraley, whose full beard and long, blond hair reminded him of a Viking. Surely, he figured, that could be the inspiration for something cool.
At the beginning of spring training, Cessa asked Fraley what he thought, and he was excited to hear the idea was even more fitting than he’d guessed: Fraley had recently done an online ancestry service and learned he was partially descended from Norsemen. It was perfect. And while it was inspired by one player, Cessa and Fraley quickly decided it would apply to the whole squad, because a Viking-themed home-run celebration was far too cool to be limited to just Fraley.
Cessa ordered a helmet and cape online. The metal helmet felt like the real deal, heavy and imposing, complete with an elaborate crest and adjoining faceplate. The clubhouse was thrilled, but it would soon learn the benefits of planning ahead. As the players started playing around with it—privately, of course, as they couldn’t risk anyone else seeing their celebration before it was ready—they realized they might need a different option. The safety-minded among them wondered whether it was perhaps unwise to fling heavy metal around their faces in the heady moments after a home run.
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“It was pretty sick,” Reds second baseman Jonathan India says. “But it was real heavy. It could have cut some people in the face.”
So they pivoted. Cessa bought another helmet—plastic this time. This one was a hit, and with a bit more practice in spring training, it was ready for the Opening Day spotlight.
“It slips on good, and it’s super light,” Fraley says of the new helmet. “It’s actually pretty comfortable.”
When a player’s hit leaves the yard, the dugout crowns him with the helmet, wraps the cape around his shoulders with a flourish and lets the good times row—certain home runs get special treatment, with teammates pretending to row a boat behind their Viking king. That left just one more detail. They had to learn to take their show on the road. One of the team’s flight attendants stepped up with a special box, and the helmet and cape are now transported in style. And wherever they go, it’s increasingly likely their opponent has a dugout celebration of their own.
At first, these celebrations were scattered. Think an imaginary bobsled here, an embroidered jacket there, an incoming ride in a laundry cart. Now, they are just about everywhere in MLB. If 2023 was supposed to be the year that MLB saved itself with new rules, it’s also emerged as the year of the choreographed, prop-laden, dugout home-run party. Forget the pitch clock for a moment. There may not be an area of baseball with as much innovation in the past few months as the homer celebration.
The home run is about as individual an achievement as it exists in team sports. (It can be difficult to so much as glimpse a teammate in a highlight.) But much of the joy of these new celebrations is how they unfold into elaborate group affairs. Each dugout offers different roles to play: One player might be the keeper of the celebratory prop, another might bestow it on the hitter, others might gather around with specific cheers and chants. The Orioles drink from a home-run hose. The Tigers pretend to be the Red Wings. The Twins go fishing, while the Red Sox lift inflatable dumbbells. The Angels have a samurai helmet, the Brewers, a cheesehead, and the Mariners, a trident.
It’s a dramatic change for a league where celebrating a home run used to earn a player accusations of showboating, a fastball to the ribs, handwringing about unwritten rules or some miserable combination of all the above. It’s been just eight years since the bat flip heard ’round the world set off seemingly endless discourse. But changing times have worn down even the most strident traditionalists.
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MLB itself has built campaigns around the idea that everyone should Let the Kids Play! These celebrations also have room to thrive in a different way than your standard bat flip: They are fixed club routines, not individual displays of emotion, which makes any of the old complaints about ego or grandstanding feel beside the point. There’s still plenty of room for personal expression here. But these moves are more about the team. They’re expressions of collective joy rather than statements of individual pride.
Once players saw a few clubs experimenting, it didn’t take long for more to get on board, with their own props in hand.
“Human beings are funny when it comes to trends,” says Andrew McCutchen of the Pirates, who became the first player to wield the team’s home run cutlass back in April. “You’ll see something that starts getting a little bit of attention, maybe a team is celebrating and the next person goes, Man, we need to do that. It’s just kind of the snowball effect from there. And it’s great. … You’ve got to find ways to have fun and celebrate the small things as much as you can.”
One feature many of them have in common? Plenty of celebrations, like the Reds’ Viking, were started by a pitcher. Just because they aren’t hitting any home runs themselves doesn’t mean they aren’t invested in how to enjoy them. (Shohei Ohtani, as ever, is the exception—though, yes, he was the one behind the home-run samurai helmet for the Angels.) This is partly an interest in contributing to the game however possible even while not on the field. That manifests in how welcome the dugout celebrations have become, too: A pitcher isn’t going to be offended by a perceived slight if he was the one to orchestrate his own team celebration. And it’s partly that pitchers simply have the time. No one has more days off to sit around and ruminate.
“We’ve got a lot more time on our hands than the position players do,” Orioles pitcher Keegan Akin says. “I think that’s how all those ideas come about.”
Akin was one of the pitchers who assembled the hose the Orioles drink from after a home run. (The team has branded it a water hose rather than a beer bong, despite how easy it may be to assume it is the latter, going with the alliterative “homer hose” over the rhyming “dong bong”: This hydration aims to stay family friendly.) It’s another celebration that got its start in spring training. Every year, Baltimore’s younger players put on a talent show for the rest of the team, and this spring, five of them designed a synchronized dance routine that evoked a sprinkler system.
“I don’t want to give too much away,” Orioles outfielder Austin Hays says. “But it was just a phenomenal performance.” That laid the groundwork for a teamwide love of waterworks: All of their celebrations are built on this theme. If a player hits a single, he pantomimes turning on a faucet. If he gets extra bases, he pretends to be a sprinkler. If he hits a home run? Get out the hose for a drink.
Orioles pitcher Cole Irvin came up with the idea and ordered the hose online. When it arrived at the clubhouse, however, Akin was the first to notice a small problem: It was blue. That wasn’t going to cut it. Any celebratory prop would naturally have to be in Orioles colors. So Akin got out some orange and black tape and covered the hose in alternating strips. Voilà. They now had just the prop to round out their aquatic celebration circuit.
Frazier takes flight 🚀 pic.twitter.com/h6Z8rSCOn7
— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) April 30, 2023
But unlike the Reds, they didn’t have time to practice with their new toy before they broke it out in a game. The first Oriole to homer after Irvin and Akin put together the hose was first baseman Ryan Mountcastle—a second-inning shot against the A’s on April 10—and he was honored accordingly as the first person to drink from it.
“The first homer hose, we were a little bit rusty, but then we cleaned it up,” Mountcastle says. “Now it’s smooth sailing.”
A few weeks later, fans have embraced it as a symbol of the team. Hays says he even met a kid who brought a miniature hose to the ballpark for him to sign: “Probably for apple juice,” he deadpans.
And a pitcher was the mastermind behind the Pirates’ dugout prop, too. Pittsburgh starter Mitch Keller says the team first considered introducing a celebration last year—maybe something designed to look like a cannonball, they’d thought, befitting their role as Pirates. “But it was like halfway through the year, and we were like, It’s just too late,” he says. He kept thinking about what they could do for 2023. But no inspiration struck during spring training. The day before the home opener, however, Keller attended an event at a Pittsburgh brewery introducing a beer named after him. He met a pair of diehard fans who come to every game dressed as pirates—plastic sword included. Their conversation got him thinking that a cutlass would be perfect for a dugout home-run celebration, and those fans thought so, too.
The husband-and-wife pair call themselves the Pittsburgh Pirate Queen Banshee and the Queen’s Consort Scriv’ner. (They prefer not to share their real names in print.) They sit in Section 132 at PNC Park, and for nine years, they’ve worn full buccaneer garb to every game. But their plastic sword actually predates their pirate costumes: They’d bought it previously for the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival. (It’s hard to remember after so long, but the Queen Banshee believes they bought it from Museum Replicas Limited, which specializes in reproduction swords and armor.) After years of service, the cutlass might be ready for a new home, the couple decided. So if Keller wanted a plastic sword for the dugout? They would give him theirs.
Which presented a problem they weren’t sure anyone had encountered before: How does a fan give a player a sword?
They couldn’t exactly call the front office and say they had a cutlass they needed to give a starting pitcher. “There’s no paperwork for this,” jokes the Queen Banshee. They first tried tagging Keller on Twitter after the brewery event. But they figured their best plan would simply be to hang around the first row of their section after the home opener and see whether they (and their sword) could catch the eyes of any players walking off the field. Sure enough, they connected with Pirates reliever David Bednar, who in turn flagged down Keller.
“He runs over, and, you could see, he was like a kid on Christmas,” says the Queen Banshee. “His eyes lit up.”
The couple gave him the cutlass, along with some electrical tape “for future repairs,” says the Queen Banshee. Ever since, any player who homers gets to wield the sword, complete with any choreography they like.
“It ended up perfect,” Keller says. “It was such a coincidence, but it’s cool. … It’s so simple and makes it even more fun. It’s not like it’s going to determine the game out here or anything. But if we’re light in the dugout having fun with it—especially as pitchers who aren’t playing—it just keeps the energy up.”
As celebrations have spread around the league, they’ve diversified. And the question of what makes a perfect one is a matter of taste.
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Some players advocate for a prop that meshes with the club identity. “Whatever you do has to match the team,” McCutchen says. “The Pirates, a cutlass, it makes sense.” Others think the key is a celebration with jobs as many teammates as possible. “Because it can be done by anybody in the dugout—anybody can hold the hose and anybody can pour the water in there—we can get the entire team involved,” Hays says. “That definitely makes it more fun.” Some enjoy a celebration inspired by a single player (hello, Reds), while others like one that feels equally fitting for the whole team.
And part of a great celebration is recognizing when it’s reached the end of its natural lifespan. The Red Sox, for instance, garnered attention for their laundry cart rides in 2021 and ’22. But those were the brainchild of former backup catcher Kevin Plawecki. After he was released by the Sox last September, the roster decided they had to retire the cart and move on to a new celebration, one inspired by a different player. So they decided to mark each home run in ’23 with inflatable dumbbells in honor of left fielder Masataka Yoshida, whose nickname is “Macho Man.” When playing in his native Japan, his walk-up music was the song by the Village People, complete with a highlight reel that showed him doing curls. (And speaking of great home run celebrations: Japan is a fount of inspiration.) Now, Boston players pick up their mini blow-up weights and flex for each dinger.
Which is another pathway for a great celebration—anything tying into the theme of strength. “I like holding the little weights,” says Red Sox outfielder Alex Verdugo. “It makes sense. You’ve got power.” The right move has to be simple enough that it can be done quickly but striking enough to make a statement.
Silly? Sure. The players are some of the first to admit that. But therein lies the point. The season is a grind, and slumps are inevitable as bodies get sore and moods turn sour. Joy is worth seizing however it comes—with inflatable dumbbells, or a drink from a hose, or twirl of a plastic sword.
“It’s little things like that that are going to help you in the long haul,” McCutchen says. “And yeah, it can come off as kind of lame. But for us, it’s just something we can celebrate, and that can bring light to a game with a lot of failure.”
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