When I was a kid, the first Little League team I ever played for happened to be sponsored by our local hot dog restaurant. As it so happened, our team was really good that season. (Not through anything I did — I was destined to be a baseball fan and not a player at an early age.) So my teammates and I had many victory lunches at Franksville on Harlem & Addison in Chicago. Yes, the restaurant is still there, even after all those free hot dogs they gave us kids.
I don’t know if sponsored youth sports teams are a thing of the past or not. But sports and meat are two things that have always gone so well together – imagine going to a baseball game and not having a hot dog! A couple of weeks ago, we covered a new sponsorship that Minnesota’s Ambassador Meats had with the state’s Pond Hockey Championships. A few years ago, I wrote about the sponsorship that New York processor Sahlen’s had with the Buffalo Bisons. That sponsorship, incidentally, turned into a much bigger deal because of the fact that the Toronto Blue Jays played a shortened season in Buffalo because of U.S. and Canada COVID-19 restrictions. So for a little while at least, a family-run meat processor had the naming rights to the home of a Major League Baseball team, as Sahlen Field became home away from home for the Toronto Blue Jays.