How did oversized, ludicrous novelty ballpark foods get out of hand by the year 2026? We look back at the way things used to be.
The legend goes like this: R&B legend Luther Vandross, was out of hamburger buns one day. Unwilling to eat a hamburger with a knife and fork like a Bolshevik savage, he looked around and found the next best thing in the kitchen. It happened to be a donut, which he cut in half. It was delicious, and he shared his creation. The Luther was born.
That sounds like a very, very tidy story, which probably means it's an urban legend. But the underlying truth checks out. America loved creating and eating horrific food-bending abominations after the turn of the century. People made special trips to experience these monstrosities, traveling hundreds of miles for a taste.
When people made special trips to see something, the minor leagues paid attention. They wanted people to see their somethings, too.
This is how a minor league team got a lot of press for their own ridiculous donut burger. I'm not sure if the Gateway Grizzlies' Krispy Kreme Burger was the very first ballpark food monstrosity back in 2006, but it's at least a forefather of the monstrosity movement. They got butts in the seats. They were a story.
And the ridiculous-ballpark-food arms race was on.
More minor league teams followed. The West Michigan Whitecaps introduced the 4,000-calorie Fifth Third Burger. The Lake County Captains responded with a three-pound fish sandwich on a loaf of bread. Then the major league teams stumbled along like a dad with a backwards hat, deciding they needed to get in on the action. The Texas Rangers came out with a two-foot hot dog slathered in death. It didn't stop.
By the year 2016, teams were tripping over themselves trying to be more outlandishly caloric than the next team. Thirty years later, it seems hard to imagine, but it was hard to go a day without another ballpark announcing a new concession that was covered in cheese, deep-fried, and sandwiched between two slices of deep-fried cheese.
What were they thinking back then? How did everything get so out of hand? We can answer that. Here is the Oral History of Outrageous Ballpark Foods, from 2006 to 2026.
* * *
The beginning
Tony Funderberg, Gateway Grizzlies GM (2006)
We (had) the opportunity to bring in a new concession item for the past two seasons and each of them were very successful.
Scott Lane, West Michigan Whitecaps president (2009)
We always tried to come up with something new and innovative. We believe it's very important to the overall experience.
Adam Richman, Man vs. Food host (2009)
I find that the food in minor league ballparks is all about personality, rather than price point, which is so endemic to the major leagues ... It makes each snack bar a destination instead of just another place to plunk down your credit card and get a beer or a hot dog in that little foil thing.
bazscott, Internet commenter (2009)
Golly! What has this world come to? I remember when a hamburger was a hamburger. This generation has ruined the economy, the nations image, and now hamburgers! That's not a hamburger, that's a baby cow in a loaf of bread. Next thing you know they will be selling 3 foot hotdog weiners. That's a huge weiner. I don't know what to think anymore. I know my grandson will not be getting that "burger" when we go to the park and that's final.
Grant Brisbee, SB Nation baseball writer
No, that was a real Internet comment.
* * *
Upping the ante
Marc Normandin, food monstrosity expert, SB Nation (2014)
We were at an annual company meetup in Washington D.C., and I brought up the idea of traveling around to different ballparks, sampling some of the more outlandish stadium foods across the country.
Spencer Hall, editorial director, SB Nation (2014)
I met Marc, and after spending a few minutes talking to him, I realized that I was very much in favor of him quitting or dying. And then he came up with this idea, which was amazing timing.
Marc Normandin
The first trip was to the Rangers' ballpark, where they were serving a two-foot Korean beef sandwich covered with spicy slaw and Sriracha mayo and ... well, I'm not sure what else. But it was huge. It was named the "Choomongous" after the Rangers' new outfielder, Vance Mongous. I met up with my friend, Lana, and she helped record it all.
Lana Berry, Internet vagrant (2016)
While Marc was eating the beef sandwich, I ate a Boomstick, which is a two-foot, one-pound hot dog topped with chili, nacho cheese, and grilled onions. I made the mistake of finishing it by the sixth inning, so I had to sit there for three innings with a brick in my stomach. I had to meet up with someone, and I was leaning on the railing because I couldn't stand.
Marc Normandin
(The Choomongous) wasn't bad. At first. Then I had to use the toilet after the game. It felt like I swallowed a hive of hornets, and then it was like some sort of William Wallace super-hornet rallied the other hornets and led them to freedom through my anus.
Lana Berry
10/10. Would eat again.
Ken Drakerson, director of public relations, Sugar Land Skeeters (2017)
So, you've got donut burgers, right? You have hot dogs with churro buns. And it's like, you know, where do you go from here? Bigger hot dogs. Bigger burgers. Donuts inside of burgers. We were working 13-hour days to think of this stuff. Maybe a hot dog made out of buns, between a bun made out of hot dogs?
Ha ha, I don't know, man. We were wild.
Marc Normandin
I wept for an hour. It wasn't so bad the second time (I had the sandwich).
Ken Drakerson
Then it hit me. You feed donuts to cows, like a foie gras thing. You make donut steaks. Literally steaks made out of donuts, donuts made out of steaks.
Marcia Gutierrez, VP of communications, Sugar Land Skeeters (2018)
Oh, PETA hated it.
Ken Drakerson
We would feed the calves nothing but donuts until they were adults, and then we would slaughter the cattle in-house. Then we would render the tallow down and use that to make the donuts. It was donuts making the fat that made the donuts. Then we cooked steaks from that same cow and sprinkled it on the donut. We called it the Cowception Burger, and it was $90.
Also, the donut was the size of a hubcap and filled with fried butter.
Lana Berry
10/10. Would eat again.
Ken Drakerson
We sure got a lot of free publicity out of that. Which was the point. One guy pretended to have a heart attack so he could sue us or something, and he did actually die, but I had job offers from all over. What a whirlwind.
The Golden Age of Absurd Ballpark Food
Marcus Almon, Director, Culinary Atrocities, Arizona Diamondbacks (2019)
You have to understand, I was under a lot of pressure at my new job. This was the first position of its kind, and I had to justify my own existence.
Ken Drakerson, Grand Inquisitor, Ballpark Food , Houston Astros (2019)
I finally get a front office position with a major league team, but all of a sudden, there were these new kids on the block, these MBAs with their Harvard connections. Some of them were complete buffoons, just totally unprepared, but some of them were really good. We all took notice.
Marcus Almon
My epiphany came when I was like, hey, why are we combining all these different pieces of the same animal into a giant burger or whatever. We should just give them the entire animal.
Ken Drakerson
Almon was one of the best, and I hated him. But I feared him. Respected him.
Marcus Almon
That's how the Oh Wow Luau! was born. An entire suckling pig, roasted on a spit that was made out of rock candy and salt. The only problem was that I wanted people to eat the whole thing, so we had to make the bones edible.
Lawrence Pras, food scientist, ConAgra (2019)
I was offered a lot of money to make a pig with ... oh, god ... a pig with genetically modified bones that were malleable, digestible, and tasted good. It took me 18 months. The pigs would ...
/sobbing
... flop all over the place after they were born, oinking and screaming, unable to put weight on their hideous, edible skeletons. Oh, please, you have to believe me, I took their money, but I would give it all back. I would give it all back.
Dave Stewart, GM, Arizona Diamondbacks (2019)
Oh, PETA hated it.
Ken Drakerson
I wanted to die, it was such a good idea. Their attendance was through the roof. They probably sold ... 40,000 of those that year? At $100 a pop? That idea made someone a millionaire, and I was just sick with envy. I was hired by the Yankees a week before that, and they still expected me to one-up the Diamondbacks. It was too late, way too late. What a mess.
Lawrence Pras
I failed my family. I failed my god.
* * *
Flying too close to the sun on wings of meat
Ken Drakerson, President, Abomination Arts, New York Yankees (2020)
We launched Operation: Animal Kingdom Come. It was ambitious, I'll tell you that. We were going to make a hot dog the length of a surfboard, except it was going to be made from the meat of every legally available animal.
Marcus Almon
Drakerson didn't sleep. He was a damned genius.
Ken Drakerson
We had a legal team of 13 different lawyers and paralegals, and their only job was to clear animals for consumption. Aardvarks? Yep. Blue whales? Nope. For now. That sort of thing. We found out that most of the animals with pouches were edible, so we would fry the pouches and fill them with ranch dressing to put on the side.
Clara Alagar, president, PETA (2020)
Oh, we hated the shit out of that idea.
Ken Drakerson
It was a social media sensation. An absolute smash. Deadspin did a post on us, which got the ball rolling. SB Nation, Bleacher Report, Rabble Town, Fornicle. Facebook was booming, Instagram and Fliptram were going off. We got over 300,000 hookems on our Crumdl post, which was the most ever at the time. I was on GMA, The View, Sportscenter, hell, even FS1. It was a damned sensation. People were stopping me on the street. Can you imagine? It got to my head.
Marcus Almon
Then he screwed up. I get it, he was under pressure and working non-stop, but he got sloppy, and it ended up screwing us all.
Ken Drakerson
One animal. We messed up on one animal. The pangolin. You know, one of those Chinese armadillo things, and I figured, hell, I've heard of a pangolin, so it can't be that endangered. I said, clear it, put it in the hot dog, and move on to the next one. The Feds moved in and shut us all down.
Marcus Almon
All of a sudden, we had way too much scrutiny to get creative. All this red tape. For everyone. Every team, down to the independent leagues. Couldn't even scramble an egg without some guy in a suit taking it to a lab.
* * *
The Beginning of the End
Marcus Almon (2022)
We started to do things without meat, just to push them across, but it was a mess. We made a noodle that wrapped around the stadium. Like, four miles of a single noodle, wrapping around the entire ballpark. It was as thick as a Volkswagen, and we covered it with spaghetti sauce.
You were supposed to buy a ticket to get in a special section to have all-you-can-eat noodle, but security was ... hell, I don't even know. It was chaos.
Local teenager (2022)
I licked that noodle for like a half-block before someone chased me away. Then I hopped the fence, and I went right back to licking that noodle.
Other local teenager
Ha ha, hell yeah, you licked that noodle.
Local teenagers
/high-five each other
Marcus Almon
Around this time, Drakerson started to lose it.
Ken Drakerson
The whole industry was collapsing. I had two homes, a boat, living the high life. And then, nothing. The Yankees fired me, and I couldn't even get a job as an usher.
Marcus Almon
None of us were handling the collapse very well, but he was completely coked out of his head.
Ken Drakerson
I went to the Seattle Mariners, right? I said, listen, you want an idea? A hamburger made out of Prince Namor. Yeah, the Sub-Mariner, the prince of Atlantis. Just imagine it. You could sell little nibbles of it for $500. The whole hamburger would be a million, easy.
Kim Ng, GM, Mariners (2023)
We kept saying, over and over, "Ken. That's a comic book. He's not real. That's a comic book."
Ken Drakerson
I said fuck that, give me the money for a submersible, a year, a duffel bag filled with cocaine, and I'll get you enough of Prince Namor's flesh to make the best damned burger anyone has ever tasted.
Marcus Almon
Someone in the office heard he came back with a picture of Lou Diamond Phillips stapled to a cuttlefish. He actually sold the thing for $1,000.
Ken Drakerson
I used that $1,000 to buy $1,000 worth of cocaine.
* * *
The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization and Obscene Ballpark Foods
Marcus Almon
The Braves. They topped us all. But at that point, we could all see that it was going downhill, and it was hard to care.
Ted Turner
I SAID, WELL, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH TURNER FIELD? THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO TEAR IT DOWN. I SAID, ARE YOU NUTS? FILL IT WITH CHILI.
Terence McGuirk, Braves CEO
Technically, Ted didn't own the team or have any involvement with the day-to-day operations, but we looked around and thought, wait a sec, this might work. Fill it with chili.
Ted Turner
FILL IT WITH CHILI. LET THE PEOPLE SWIM IN ATLANTA BRAVES CHILI.
Marcus Almon
Oh, goodness, it was ... Mad Max doesn't even do it justice. There were news copters, throngs of people, all diving into the chili from the roof of the stadium. I mean, the chili came up to the top of the roof. People were building escalades out of garbage, just to get up there.
Ken Drakerson
It was killing on social media. Tons of Facebook traffic. Tons of Instagram likes. Twitter. Periscope. Snapchat. FarmersOnly. Ramshackle. Giggletips. LappingDandy. Pippylip.
Dan Uggla, Braves manager (2025)
There was one guy who kept calling himself the Chili Shark. Had a fin and everything. He'd just swim around in the chili, pretending to bite people.
Marcus Almon
There were about 14 different Twitter parody accounts of the Chili Shark, and they all had over 400,000 followers.
Ted Turner
WHAT GOOD IS CHILI IF IT DOESN'T BITE BACK, I'VE SAID THIS FOR YEARS. I AM 88 YEARS OLD. I HAVE YEARNED FOR A CHILI SHARK.
Terence McGuirk
It was a pretty tight-knit group, the Chili Shark Twitter accounts. They all lived on Parody Row in Beverly Hills. Where most of the other famous parody accounts on Twitter lived.
Ken Drakerson
Stoopo. Baebar. Crabstand. Granchgranch. Florminy. Just killing it on social media.
Marcus Almon
And then they found the body in the chili.
Dan Uggla
They figured it was a drifter or something, but it was turns out the Chili Shark was actually murdering people and sinking the corpses in the chili. It's not like the cops could do anything. They had their own problems, and the Turner Chili Bowl became a bad scene. A bad, bad scene.
Terence McGuirk
By the end of the Fourth-Term Obama Riots, the murder drones were flying right over the ballpark, just picking people off for no reason.
Marcus Almon
Everyone started to sense that society was collapsing, and eventually the whole place turned into a lawless, fetid chili orgy.
Ken Drakerson
Literally thousands of people writhing in chili, fornicating without hope or joy, desperate for a rapture or resolution that wasn't going to come.
Ted Turner
I MADE A VERY BAD SUGGESTION.
* * *
Epilogue
Marcus Almon
The last I heard, Drakerson was working for a barnstorming team in New Louisville. Once the Atlantic rose and swallowed the Eastern Seaboard, everyone migrated inland, and everything was kind of helter skelter for a while. But baseball survived, somehow. And Drakerson, bless him, had a new idea for a wacky ballpark food.
Ken Drakerson
It was going to be a hamburger. About a quarter-pound. Made out of beef. There would be a bun. We couldn't find lettuce, but I found a guy with a tomato. I got the tomato.
Marcus Almon
No one had seen a hamburger after President Grohl declared martial law after the crops failed. I didn't even think there was a cow left, but I don't even want to know what the meat was.
Ken Drakerson
It was beef, dammit. One-hundred-percent beef. I paid 35,600 bottlecaps for it. It was going to be amazing.
Sgt. Porlz, New Louisville Corrections Force
We got a call about 10:39, local time, and we were informed that the individual transporting the hamburger was murdered and the hamburger was missing. Also, the individual's face was eaten off because that is what we do for sustenance, here in the future.
Ken Drakerson
It would have been a good burger.
Marcus Almon
Then I started thinking ...
Ken Drakerson
What about a manburger? Right? About 160 pounds of it, if you source it well.
Marcus Almon
Covered in fried glands ...
Ken Drakerson
With buns made by stretching human skin and rolling it flat?
Marcus Almon
We were back.
Ken Drakerson
Oh, hell, yes. We were back.
Marcus Almon
We were reborn.
Ken Drakerson
We were reborn.