If you haven’t eaten breakfast or lunch yet today, it may be exceedingly difficult to do so now. Over the weekend, the Erie Seawolves, the Double-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, unveiled a special product for their Sugar Rush Night. It is the kind of special anti-treat that you will never be able to unsee but will hopefully be able to uneat. It is the most grotesque image I’ve ever encountered in the Stunt Baseball Foodstuffs category, and I can’t stop thinking about it. You’ve already seen it.
That abomination right up there is the cotton candy hot dog, a depraved and frankly unsightly creation that could only have been the work of a focus-group of tweenaged maniacs who’d just snorted a raft Pixie Sticks. It’s quite the elevator pitch: “a hot dog, but the bun’s been replaced by a cotton candy exterior, and the ketchup and mustard are now Nerds™.” Psychedelic stadium food has become a deeply cursed foodway unto itself, but there is something about this that is so overtly unholy and wrong that it separates itself even from its peers. It may never return to UPMC Park, but it will never leave my brain.
Here’s video of a poor Seawolf, Tigers 2017 first-rounder Alex Faedo, giving it a try:
The team’s account insists in a reply that their pitching prospect said “it was not too bad,” but suspiciously did not record him saying as much in the video above. Is it because he violently projectile vomited right after the reel cuts out? We’ll never know for sure, but it seems like the most likely outcome.