It all began 10 years ago as a whimsical one-off minor league baseball promotion that ended with a contest.
“Seinfeld Night” at the Brooklyn Cyclones is now a “Must-See-TV” kind of New York summer tradition, a game that easily sells out the 7,500 seats at the team’s Coney Island ballpark every year and demonstrates the show’s enduring appeal.
It’s a night that combines the zaniness of “Seinfeld,” a Coney Island freak show and a lower-level minor league baseball team that has all the chutzpah of a short, stocky, balding man trying to impress a woman by pretending to be a marine biologist.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
On Saturday night, there were numerous contests. Men got as much ice cream on their face as possible. Soup was dumped on the head of someone who had been repeatedly scolded: “No soup for you!” And it all ended, of course, with 20 dancing Elaines.
It did not matter much that the Cyclones — make that the Bubble Boys — got shut out 3-0 by their archrivals, the Hudson Valley Renegades. (The Cyclones are part of the Mets organization and the Renegades belong to the Yankees.)
“It’s like a ‘Seinfeld’ convention with a baseball game in the background,” said Billy Harner, assistant general manager for the Cyclones, who created the promotion in 2014. He recalled how the team lost that first “Seinfeld Night” game, 17-3, but he knew he was on to something because none of the fans left before the Elaine dance contest at the end.
“People travel from all over the country, from overseas for this,” he said. “They’re not just from Bensonhurst or Bay Ridge. It’s gone from a typical minor league promotion done on a nickel-and-dime budget to something much bigger now.”
The young Cyclones players, many of them foreign-born, may not get the references to the show — they seemed bemused and baffled for much of Saturday night — so Harner has been known to give the team a box set of “Seinfeld” DVDs to watch on their bus during a road trip. Most had no idea why they were wearing Bubble Boys jerseys. But they’re thrilled to play in a jam-packed stadium, Harner said.
To keep it fresh, Harner digs deep into the show’s archive for inspiration for contests and minor characters to invite. Clips play on the scoreboard. The fans eat it up.
On Saturday, they got to see Mr. Lippman (Elaine’s boss, as played most frequently by Richard Fancy) and Jean Paul, the Trinidadian marathoner who struggles to wake up in time for races, played by Jeremiah Birkett, who gleefully cursed while gathering runners for a race around the field.
One runner who deliberately disqualified himself by leaving early was wearing a “Moops” shirt, a reference to the famous “Bubble Boy” episode (it’s a “Trivial Pursuit” typo).
That is the kind of hardcore fan who still approaches Birkett on the street, all these years after his lone “Seinfeld” appearance. He’s even been recognized for it at the airport in Düsseldorf, Germany.
“When my phone rings and it’s something about ‘Seinfeld,’ I’m never surprised,” Birkett said. His recurring role on “Lucifer” is the only one of his career that comes anywhere close to matching the intensity of “Seinfeld” fandom, he said.
Many fans who participated in Saturday night’s contests were under 35, mostly too young to have seen the show during its original run, and said they inherited their love for “Seinfeld” from their parents.
Patrick Westervelt Jr., a 26-year-old software engineer from Milford, N.J., found the show during the pandemic and watched every episode. He recreated a George Costanza moment by plunging his face into a bowl of ice cream.
“Seinfeld’s a great show. It holds up a lot,” he said. “I like how it can go back and forth between very subdued humor and very over-the-top humor at the drop of a dime.”
The night’s signature event is its grand finale, the Elaine dance contest. This year’s winner was Shannon Kintner, a 34-year-old fashion producer from the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, who hatched a plan in the spring to get her friends to come to the game and watch her dance in what George Costanza described as a “full-body dry heave, set to music.”
The crowd loved her dance so much, they chanted her name.
“I grew up watching a lot of ‘Seinfeld,’” she said. “My parents were huge ‘Seinfeld’ fans.” She described herself as a baseball fan who grew up going to minor league games.
“It’s summer to me,” she said. “It’s peak summer, just being at a baseball game, eating hot dogs, being on the field doing something really silly.”
Read More: ‘Serenity Now!’ How ‘Seinfeld Night’ Became a New York Summer Tradition.
