Cracker Jacks have been around longer than Fenway Park. In a city where we measure so much around 1912, the year our baseball shrine opened, that’s a big deal. About the only thing older than Cracker Jacks in all of baseball is the infield dirt, and even that gets changed out every 20 or so years in our cherished Back Bay bandbox, in the interest of better drainage, fielding, base running.
But Cracker Jacks have endured, through World Wars, Prohibition, baseball scandals, labor strikes, even Bucky Dent’s homer. Fenway concessions are loaded with them. The standard bag (2? ounces) sells for $4.50. If you plan your ballpark diet around “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’’ and purchase a bag of peanuts and Cracker Jacks, it will run you $9.25.
Based on Fenway pricing, Cracker Jacks sell for $25.04 a pound. Nothing peanuts about that.
“Yeah, that’s like gold,’’ noted Chris Bigelow, a Florida-based food service consultant with some 40 years of experience in the concessions business, typically as an adviser to pro teams in their negotiations with concessionaires. “A lot of places stopped selling Cracker Jacks. They got so expensive for a while, you couldn’t find them at a ballpark. They’re back, but pretty much as a nostalgia item more than for sales.’’
That caramelized concoction of popcorn and nuts — never enough nuts, by the way! — dates to 1896, the handiwork of Fritz Rueckheim, a German immigrant who first started popping popcorn about 20 years earlier at his sidewalk stand in Chicago. The big breakthrough in sales came in 1899, when Henry Eckstein invented his wax-sealed “Triple Proof Package’’ that protected Rueckheim’s munchies from moisture, bacteria, and dust.
In 1908, Cracker Jacks reached American icon status when Philadelphia-born lyricist Jack Norworth teamed up with composer Albert Von Tilzer to create the “Take Me Out to the Ball Game’’ song. In American sport of the day, baseball was king, and the Norworth-Von Tilzer creation crowned Cracker Jacks the queen of the concession stands, placing it right there with the murderer’s row of beer, hot dogs, and more beer.
According to Bigelow, beer remains the industry leader in ballpark sales, typically totaling between 40 and 50 percent of the gross take, food and beverage combined. He said a “reasonable’’ estimated average at Fenway, for food and beverage sales, is about $20 per customer (“percap’’ in industry terms). With some 3 million in attendance each season at Fenway, that would mean the Red Sox gross approximately $60 million annually in concession sales.
“Beer, hot dogs, soft drinks, that’s still the core . . . not much has changed, at least in the 40 years I’ve been around it,’’ said Bigelow. “About 20 percent of the menu drives 80 percent of the sales. Cracker Jack sales would be way, way down the list . . . I don’t know if they’d even make the scoreboard.’’
Norworth, who died in 1959, didn’t make it to a big league ballpark until 1940, at age 61. He is buried at Melrose Abbey Memorial Park in Anaheim, Calif., less than a mile from where the Angels play their home games. An impressive monument stands at his gravesite, the lyrics of his song, including the words “Cracker Jack’’ etched into the handsome black stone.
“May we remember this great American now,’’ read the words at the bottom of Norworth’s monument, “and during every seventh-inning stretch.’’
The overall Fenway food experience has exploded in recent times, particularly over the course of the nearly 15 years the team and park have been owned by John Henry and partners. From an eating standpoint, Fenway now far out-Faneuils Faneuil Hall, right down to the $14 lobster roll available at the vendor below the third base box seats. A restaurant with $60 million in sales can get creative, take chances with an audience held captive and hungry for hours.
Back in the early ’60s, before the Hub’s hardball reawakening with the Impossible Dream season of 1967, food selections at Fenway were sparse, borderline soup-kitchen standards. Beer, hot dogs, popcorn, and, yes, Cracker Jacks, made up nearly 100 percent of the menu. A bleacher seat cost $1. The purchase of a beer, dog, and Cracker Jacks added roughly another $1. In 1966, the federal minimum wage was $1.25 an hour. It was cheap eats, and cheap entertainment.
Nowadays, Fenway’s menu is a scrumptious menagerie of specialty stands, including lobster, pizza, Italian sausage, kettle corn, and much more. In the years just before 1967, the park’s lone specialty stand was a popcorn machine, located behind the Section 18 grandstand seats, where customers sometimes lined up to watch the popcorn popping behind a glass partition. The smell was intoxicating and strong, to the point it even masked the pungent smell of the beer-soaked wooden grandstand seats. Cost: 25 cents. And it was served piping hot into a container shaped like a megaphone, the bottom of which could be extracted by a pulltab, perfect for those who wanted to root, root, root for the home team.
Or even better, boo Mantle and Maris, those two hot dogs in pinstripes.
The Cracker Jack brand today is part of the Frito-Lay snack empire and the $4.50 bags at Fenway are typically found bunched in with similar-sized offerings of peanuts, Cheetos, Lay’s potato chips, Doritos, and bags of candy, a veritable Pablo Sandoval buffet table. The concession biz is growing, an ever-crowded feast.
“Cracker Jacks? Yeah, sure, we still sell them,’’ said Paul Gulinello, taking inventory at his concession stand behind third base last week. “But peanuts outsell ’em, I bet maybe 2 to 1. When we’re out of popcorn, that’s when we sell Cracker Jacks.’’
Born under the slogan, “The More You Eat The More You Want,’’ Cracker Jacks have seen better days. But like baseball itself, it endures, in an increasingly competitive field.
“But I’ll tell you, as a Cracker Jack fan,’’ said Bigelow, “they need to add more nuts.’’
Kevin Paul Dupont’s “On Second Thought’’ appears regularly in the Sunday Globe Sports section. He can be reached at dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.
