The story behind the White Sox pope hat
· Yahoo Sports
CHICAGO — During a public appearance at the Vatican last year, Pope Leo XIV was photographed wearing a Chicago White Sox cap. So it’s fitting that a stadiumful of baseball fans will be reciprocating the gesture. For the Aug. 11 game against the Cincinnati Reds at Rate Field, everyone attending will receive a White Sox version of the pope’s pointy ceremonial hat, or a “mitre” in the parlance.
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Initially, it was planned as a special ticket giveaway limited to 1,500 people attending.
“It was a way for us to test the waters and, within 24 hours of the announcement, we tripled that number in ticket sales,” said Mike Downey, the White Sox senior director of marketing and fan promotions. “We were getting so much positive sentiment that we expanded it to an all-fan giveaway. Everyone who comes to the ballpark will get a pope hat.”
That means 40,000-plus pope hats will be in the stadium that day.
The idea for the promotion first started percolating last year, when the new pope was announced. Born Robert Francis Prevost, Pope Leo is a Chicago native and longtime fan of the White Sox.
“Immediately, when he was announced as pope, my head was spinning,” Downey said. “No other baseball team in major league baseball history has ever done a pope-themed promotion because there hasn’t been a pope from the United States before and we haven’t had a pope who was a recognized baseball fan.”
Ideas were floated and discarded, Downey said, including a pope bobblehead.
“We could not get the official approval to use the pope’s name, image and likeness.” They approached the Vatican, but didn’t hear back. “I’m sure he has more important and pressing things going on than to answer our email.”
So it was back to the drawing board.
Over the last year, fans have shown up to the ballpark in full pope garb, either homemade or bought from a Halloween costume shop. “That caught our eye,” Downey said, “so our thinking shifted.
“We’re trying to be respectful, we don’t want to do anything that’s going to upset the Vatican, obviously.” But how to be sure these ideas wouldn’t offend?
“I thought, let me reach out to the priest who married my wife and I,” Downey said. “His name is Father Tom Hurley; he’s a local priest here in Chicago. And by no means does he represent the archdiocese, but I reached out to him and said, ‘This is so random, but we’re thinking of doing a promotion and it’s not a stunt, but we want to celebrate that the pope is from Chicago and the White Sox are his team.’ I pitched him a few ideas and he said, ‘Oh, this one’s great, it’s funny; this other one might be sacrilegious, so I would not do that.’ And he said, ‘If I were you, I would maybe just focus on the pope hat.’ I grew up Catholic, so from the start I wanted it to be in good taste. If we’re going to make something, it can not be something that will upset Catholics.”
The official term for the hat is mitre and the design itself is not copyrighted.
“Neither his name nor his photo are on it,” Downey said. “There’s nothing pope-related on the hat we’re giving away, it’s just the shape. We’ve done sailor caps before, we’ve done cowboy hats, any sort of hat. And we thought, we can do a pope hat — nobody owns the rights to the pope hat.”
Downey took pains to underscore that the White Sox are “not poking fun at anything. Our thought was: We keep seeing the pope wearing a White Sox hat, why don’t we give our fans a pope hat?”
Actually finding someone to mass-produce the pope hat proved to be challenging.
“If I go to a promotions company and say, ‘I want a hat with a black stripe across it,’ they would just go purchase 20,000 hats that are already premade and they would embroider a black stripe across it,” Downey said. “But this one is unique — they can’t just go buy pope hats off somebody. So we had a tough time finding a vendor that could do it the right way, because they had to figure out the design and create a new assembly line. If you look closely at how it’s shaped and how it’s designed, it’s very unique and it’s not as easy to make. They have to custom make them and we want them to look as authentic as possible. So it was a much more complicated process than people might think.”
And perhaps most companies don’t have their machinery set up for this kind of item.
“That, and I think they’re probably scared to fumble, right?” said Toby Ramos, the team’s senior director of design. “This is something that’s going to be headline news, they don’t want to be the company that messed it up.”
The White Sox ultimately went with a company called Cotopaxi. Apparently it was not an issue when the order was increased from 1,500 to 40,000-plus.
“That’s an opportunity vendors love to take on,” Downey said. “We started working on this in January, so the vendor had ample time to make the adjustment to the order number.”
The White Sox could have considered a cheaper option. Instead of a stiff fabric hat that stands 11 inches tall, they could have explored a flimsier version, something along the lines of the thin collapsible cardboard crowns from Burger King. That was never on the table.
“We wanted to do something that was cool and tasteful, and I knew that we had plenty of room in our budget to do this,” Downey said. “There’s no sponsor on this item, but the cost wasn’t an issue. The White Sox take a lot of pride in our promotional items. They’re very high quality and typically have a very high perceived value. That’s on purpose. I’ve always been of the mind that we should spend a little extra money to get a higher quality item and the fans are going to notice.
“These hats are big,” he added. “It’s going to be funny seeing people wearing them in a sold-out ballpark. Everyone’s view is probably going to be obstructed.”
The White Sox haven’t reached out to the Vatican about the pope hats. Do they think he’s aware of the giveaway?
“I hope he’s aware,” Downey said. “It seems like he’s been keeping up to date with how the team’s playing, that’s what we’re seeing, but I really don’t know. The pope hat is not something that we needed the Vatican to sign off on, but we are going to send a box to them.”
The players will also get a box of hats, as will other team employees and “friends” (business associates) of the team. Even members of the Cincinnati Reds will be offered pope hats, should they want them.
“It’s just going to be a cool cultural event in Chicago,” Downey said. “Picture 40,000 people rocking a pope hat, celebrating Pope Leo. We’re also going to have some fun in-game nods to the pope and the church. Just know that the intention behind the promotion is not a humorous one, it’s a celebratory intention.
“But I’m not an idiot. The vibe I’m getting is ‘you gotta be there.’ You don’t have to be a White Sox fan. If you’re in Chicago, you’re gonna want to be part of this game because it’s going to be so unique.”
The hats are expected to arrive a week or so ahead of the game.
“The White Sox have almost 25 giveaways this season, so we try to manage that inventory, otherwise we would run out of storage space.” Still, a week sounds like cutting it close if there are any shipping issues.
“I’m not worried one iota,” Downey said. “We have the pope on our side.”
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