The Tri-City Chili Peppers play in their first-ever cosmic baseball game June 1 at Shepherd Stadium in Colonial Heights against the Martinsville Mustangs. The Peppers won, 9-4. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Ninety-four years ago, the Kansas City Monarchs played baseball under the lights for the first time. On June 1, the Tri-City Chili Peppers played baseball under black lights for the first time.
The Colonial Heights collegiate baseball team, decked out in hot pink and neon green uniforms, took on the Martinsville Mustangs in the first of several games dubbed “cosmic baseball.” The idea was simple — glow-in-the-dark baseball — but making it a reality was not.
It began with giving fans glow sticks as part of a game promotion, according to team owner Chris Martin. The problem: They got lost in the bright stadium lights. But without lights, the team can’t see well enough at night to actually play. Would black lights work? A Richmond-based lighting company told Martin that there wasn’t anything in the world that was strong enough.
That led Federated Lighting of Virginia to design an ultraviolet light that could get the job done. “What you see here,” Martin says, pointing to the lights installed below the stadium’s regular lamps by J.W. Electric, “is the world’s first-ever stadium black lights that actually emit enough light and have enough focus to hit the distance that we wanted to hit to make this work.”
The two teams scrimmaged before the real matchup to make sure the black lights weren’t too jarring. “There’s that original hesitation when the lights flip,” Martin says, but after some practice, “the guys were just loving every minute of it.”
As a promotional tool for the team, which first played in 2021, cosmic baseball has been a success. The announcements got national attention from ESPN, The Athletic and Jomboy Media, which Martin says helped the team’s five-game ticket plans to double in sales and move Chili Peppers merch nationwide. Tickets for the first cosmic game on June 1 sold out weeks in advance.
“We have people flying in for cosmic baseball, which is not something most people are going to say — ‘I’m going to fly into Colonial Heights to watch a baseball game’ — but we’re hearing it all over the place,” Martin says. “They just want to come and see something that’s making history.”
