SONARAY Furnishes Lighting for World’s First “Cosmic Baseball” Game

SONARAY®, A Central Virginia-based brand of DASCOM and complete developer, manufacturer, and marketer of industrial, solar, marine, and specialty spec-grade lighting today announced it will be furnishing the black lighting for the world’s first “cosmic baseball” game. The game will be played in Colonial Heights, Virginia and will feature the Tri-City Chili Peppers of the Coastal Plain League and Greenbrier Knights.

The Coastal Plain League is a wood-bat collegiate summer baseball league featuring college players recruited from around the country. The league is best known for one of its former teams, the Savannah Bananas, now a barnstorming exhibition team (almost like the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball) that routinely sells out ballparks all over the country. Their mantra is: “We Make Baseball Fun. Fans First. Entertainment Always.” And, taking a cue from this former league member, the Tri-City Chili Peppers are also focused on fun, fans, entertainment, and baseball.

Cosmic Baseball, the brainchild of Tri-City Chili Pepper owner Chris Martin, was an idea that began by handing out glow sticks to around 1,000 fans at a game several seasons back. Martin credits the Savannah Bananas with mentoring the way the Chili Peppers look at the entertainment experience of baseball. He said in an interview with www.RichmondBizsense.com that “We’ve taken their (notion) of, ‘How can you entertain and still play baseball?’ and we’ve implemented it into what we do every day.”

Martin definitely took that mindset with the glow stick idea and carried the idea a big step further by thinking how cool it might be to play an entire game in black lighting.

Of course, such an endeavor would require not only black lighting strong enough to light historic Shepherd Stadium, but also glow-in-the-dark uniforms, baseballs, bats, and well, everything needed to play a real baseball game that would be visible under black lighting.

Martin contacted several lighting companies to see if the black lighting option was even possible.

Federated Lighting Virginia, a well-known manufacturer representative company in Richmond, Virginia brought in SONARAY. Federated Lighting began working on the lighting idea after they had been brought into the project by Capital Electric Supply in Colonial Heights. At first SONARAY engineers were hesitant that black lighting strong enough to light a field the scope of Shepherd Stadium would even be possible to create. But, undeterred, and always ready to accept a challenge, SONARAY engineers went to the drawing table and a little over a year later showed up with a light they thought would work.

Martin and the Chili Peppers tried out the black light and found that it worked really well, bringing in JW Electric for the installation of 18 lights in the stadium. They contacted athletic outfitter 3n2 Sports to develop uniforms and Wilson to develop baseballs for the game. And just like that cosmic baseball was born.

The inaugural game will be played on June 1, 2024, with three more “cosmic” games scheduled throughout the course of the team’s regular summer league.

The depth, creativity, and excitement of this event and team hasn’t gone unnoticed in the sports world as major media companies including ESPN, CBS Sports, and Sports Illustrated have done stories on the game, and some mentioned the Chili Peppers on their social media accounts (to the delight apparently of many, many followers based on the number of likes).

Robert Seward, National Sales Manager for SONARAY summed up the SONARAY participation in this exciting event this way: “It has been an absolute privilege to work with Federated Lighting Virginia and the Tri-City Chili Peppers on this project. We certainly tip our “glow-in-the-dark” caps to the Chili Peppers and Chris Martin for their collective energy, enthusiasm, and innovation in wanting to bring family-friendly entertainment to a new level. Selfishly of course we are so happy to be able to show the world that SONARAY can do things that are difficult, custom, and honestly has not been done by others in lighting. Our engineering team really showed their brilliance in designing these black lights that will allow the game to be played, but on a bigger scale it is indicative of what we do every single day. Our company takes on tasks that others won’t, and we prove time and again that we can deliver. This is true in our full line of products from hazardous location, solar, industrial, marine, and other lighting. We’re happy and proud to be a part of this event, but even happier that we put quality and ingenuity into everything we do.”

SONARAY™ is a strategic business line for DASCOM with Americas headquarters based in Central Virginia. More information on SONARAY™ LED lighting can be found at www.sonarayled.com.

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