I loved the Bags they would give away. Like Gym bags but small ones, they were pretty cool.

Beach towels are great. They should do two of those a season.
Nothing is as good as the first generation floppy hat. I missed out on the first year, then I got one the second year in hopes that it would be as good, but it wasn’t, and now I’ve soured on them. I’ll never find that hat…
Giveaway caps suck. You always feel like a mental patient on a field trip with one of them on. If they were better quality, I’d be all for them, but now, on any day after the giveaway, they just serve as markers of people to avoid.
Ticket holders are stupid, too. I have enough emailed copies of padres tickets in my inbox, so if I need to recreate a memory, I have the tools. Thanks anyway.
T-shirts are usually very good, except I don’t wear white t-shirts. My favorite obscure giveaway that recently re-entered my shirt rotation: Padres Postgame Show with faces of Coach & Scan. Scan’s hair looks great in silkscreen, too.
Gym bags were also good, and 6-pack coolers are lame.

pro tips:

• avoid plastering gawdy logos from whoever is advertising that giveaway all over the item. it just ruins it.
• order from a higher quality chinese manufacturer. crappy zippers and lame plastic adjustable straps just make the organization look cheap(er)

I LOVE the beach towels and still use them all the time (especially the one that turned into a little bag, that was genius). The gym bags and backpacks were great too, as long as they weren’t the kid giveaways. I could do without the floppy hats mainly because I can’t really see myself as a “floppy hat guy”.

Above all though I just go crazy for bobbleheads and figurines. Mostly bobbleheads. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I’m a little gay for bobbleheads. There, I said it. I’m gay for bobbleheads. The idea of having a collection of Padres, past and present, displayed on my bookshelf or something just makes me giddy. I guess this stems from going to my grandpa’s house every summer as a kid. He had a collection of Utah Jazz bobbleheads displayed on a shelf, and I would just love to look at them. So now I just have this urge to get my own collection to show to my kids, like some kind of trophy case. “These are the spoils of war” I’ll tell them, right before I sacrifice a lamb and spread its blood on their faces. My kids will love it.

Really though, Garfinkle said that they were gonna have bobbleheads next year in a fanpost a while back, and I couldn’t help but dance a little because of it.

Oh, and I would like more functional stuff with cool, non-gaudy (is that the right word) logos on them. The Astros this year had an Astros Grill Apron that made me all kinds of jealous. I’d use that sucker everytime I cook whether I needed it or not. We need stuff like that. I would like the shirt giveaways a lot more if they weren’t all XL size. My small figure just drowns in those things.

the collectible stuff. You know the stuff that might actually be worth something a few years from now. I do like the towels though and agree with everyone else about those towels that fold into a pocket. I use those towels all the time…genius idea. Floppy hats are lame though and a lot of the giveaway hats are lame too. One comment though is the bobbleheads have to be decent…Randy Jones & Dave Winfield bobbleheads and not like the crap they have been giving away lately…Peavy in a NASCAR & the Bochy, Greene, Peavy mini bobbleheads. Both of those giveaways were garbage. I think I may do a “Stadium Giveaways” week on the ’ol .400 in ’94 site.

at the poll results. Are towels (which most people have about 40 of), floppy hats (which are cool for fisherman & old dudes only) & t-shirts (that are all XL and way to big for about 90% of the crowd) that much more popular??

Almost everything was in the throwback colors: floppy hat, am radios, inaugural pennant, shirts, hats; just awesome.

The biggest issue with the giveaways now is that the logo sucks. But I’ve never seen the Lucha mask and that is pretty effin sick.

I have promo schedules from years past I’ll see if I could look it up when I get home.