About a half-hour before a mid-August Brooklyn Cyclones game, a family of three, a reporter and a middle-aged man dressed in a Jedi robe walked into an elevator at Maimonides Park. As the door closed and they began their ascent, the Jedi turned to the others and asked, “So, what planet are you all from?”
“Um, Brooklyn,” responded the matriarch of the family. The Jedi proceeded to hum “Mad About Me,” by the Mos Eisley Cantina house band, Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes, as if to tell them he was from the planet Tatooine.
When the elevator doors opened and they stepped out onto the concourse, they joined hundreds of other Jedi knights and Padawan learners fanning out across the ballpark, mingling with the mere mortals who came equipped with scorebooks, pencils and baseball gloves. Out beyond the right-field wall, in the area known as the Backyard, a few hundred others were pounding brews and playing cornhole, blissfully unaware that a baseball game — the event that their ticket said they had paid to see — was about to begin. The two main draws on this particular Saturday were Star Wars Night and the $50 all-you-can-drink deal.
The next afternoon, fans who came to see Brooklyn’s 6-0 win in the series finale between the Cyclones and the Aberdeen IronBirds were also there for bottomless mimosas on the rooftop and to play catch in left field before the first pitch.