How the Mariners struck marketing gold with ‘Hot Dogs From Heaven’

At 3:31 p.m. Thursday, the most unimaginably American weather event enveloped T-Mobile Park. A hundred hot dogs gracefully glided toward Earth, each attached to a parachute and headed for the hungry horde. From the upper deck, 12 Mariners employees — and one sports columnist — leaned over the railings and released the heated hounds.

Meanwhile, 32,347 frenzied fans lunged for the lukewarm meats — all while Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” soundtracked the silliness.

This is the Mariners’ viral marketing monsoon, a stroke of joyful genius fit for the Fourth of July. This is a moment of mid-inning levity amid a summer swoon.

This is “Hot Dogs From Heaven.”

“It’s just nothing but joy. It’s absolute happiness for 90 seconds,” Tyler Thompson, the Mariners’ senior manager of experiential marketing and game entertainment, said of the spectacle. “What could be better, especially in a ballpark, than hot dogs falling from the sky?”

(Frustrated fans might ask for a few more timely hits, but alas, we digress.)

The idea was formed last fall, when Hempler’s Foods — the Mariners’ Ferndale-based supplier of frankfurters — requested an attention-grabbing in-game promotion. A team comprising Thompson, vice president of fan experience Malcolm Rogel and coordinator of in-game entertainment Nick Sybouts proceeded to make pigs fly.

(Or cows. Or dogs. You get the point.)

According to Thompson, the name came first. But though frankfurters have long been fired out of bazookas and cannons at baseball games, it required more advanced physics (and early failures) to make them float.

“As early as November we were buying parachutes from Amazon and adhering them to hot dogs and dropping them into an empty ballpark,” said Thompson, who tested the parachutes with water bottles as well. “We learned a lot about weight distribution and parachute size and how those two things work together. The first couple we dropped were like heat-seeking missiles down from the 300 level. We thought, ‘OK, that’s not going to work.’”

The testing continued. Early parachute materials were too thin to help the frankfurters float rather than fall. Per Thompson, “they weren’t catching the air, so the wind was blowing right through them. So [the hot dogs] might as well have been attached to a napkin.”

Eventually, the team turned to a calculator from a model rocket website, which prescribed a 36-inch parachute for hot dog deliveries. Thompson and Co. custom-ordered the parachutes, which are made from a mesh material and attach to the paper packages via a carabiner clip. (Ketchup and mustard packets are included as well.)

According to Thompson, other considerations included “how the hot dog attaches to the strap, ensuring that when it’s thrown the hot dog doesn’t fly apart from the parachute; how to wrap the parachute; at what angle to throw the parachute so that it opens and glides down nicely.

“We have to take into account wind at the ballpark on the nights we drop hot dogs, too. If it’s overly breezy they might go up and come right back down into the suite level. So there’s actually quite a bit of logistics that goes into it and an assembly line that puts it all together.”

Speaking of: the Mariners have instituted a front office sign-up sheet to help wrap and distribute the hot dogs. The team’s concessions partner, Sodexo, cooks and delivers the hot dogs between the fifth and sixth innings — allowing an inning or so to wrap, package, attach the parachutes and move the dogs to individual hot bags … so the hot dogs stay hot.

Generally, in the seventh or eighth inning, the frankfurters fly.

“Up and out is really what we want to do [as far as a throwing motion],” said Thompson, whose team earned a 7-3 win over the Orioles Thursday. “If you throw them straight out they end up not having as much time to fall. If you throw them too high up they end up swinging back toward you, depending on how the wind’s blowing. So, up and out.”

Said technique has been perfected over time. The diving hot dogs debuted on April 13, in the later innings of a 4-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs. To a confused (then captivated) crowd of 38,104 inside T-Mobile Park, 50 hot dogs made their maiden flights.

Or falls.

“We had a couple little mishaps,” Thompson said. “Hot dogs would get detached from their parachute, or they weren’t wrapped the right way and the parachute wouldn’t deploy. There were definitely some nerves the first time around. But now it’s become so fun.”

For employees. For fans. For hot dog adorers.

For associated pop stars.

“The song [“Heaven is a Place on Earth”] is perfect for the moment, because it just feels like joy,” Thompson said. “We workshopped a couple different ones, and then when we played that one during one of our rehearsals we were like, ‘OK, this is definitely it.’ Belinda Carlisle has taken notice. She’s seen the feature. She’s a big fan of it. We’re hoping to potentially work with her at some point in the future.”

Of course Carlisle has seen it. A video from May of the delicious downpour received 447,000 views on Instagram and 166,000 more on “X.”  In June, a woman posted a TikTok video of her partner smiling and snagging the snack, along with a caption: “I’ve never seen my boyfriend so happy”. It’s been viewed 8.8 million times and earned 359,000 likes.

Best-selling author, chef and Seattle resident J. Kenji Lopez-Alt — he of the 694,000 Instagram followers — posted about catching a coveted hot dog while attending a game last week.

The Mariners plan to run the promotion at least 20 times this season, freeing roughly 2,000 fluttering franks. Other marketing efforts, including a mid-inning “Salmon Run” mascot race and crashing Microsoft computer rally package, have gone similarly viral as well.

But for Thompson, the Mariners’ merchant of joy, it’s all part of the job.

“I have moments all the time at work where I have to pinch myself and think, ‘I can’t believe this is my job,’” said Thompson, a Spokane native and lifelong Mariners fan. “I got my master’s degree [in sports administration from Eastern Washington], and I’m hollowing out a watermelon, or I’m attaching hot dogs to parachutes, or I’m dreaming up these four racing salmon, or whatever it is. I can’t believe this is my job and I get to do it for my favorite baseball team since I was a kid.”

A hundred hot dogs fell from the sky on the Fourth of July.

What a world we live in.