Benjamin Hill travels the nation collecting stories about what makes Minor League Baseball unique. This excerpt from the Baseball Traveler newsletter, presented by Circle K, is a mere taste of the smorgasbord of delights he offers every week. Read the full newsletter here, and subscribe to his newsletter here.
Escape the pervasive cold and darkness of our present December moment by traveling back in time to a Charleston RiverDogs game on a late spring evening. It’s an idyllic scene. The players cavort on the field and the fans cheer in the stands as hundreds of rolls of toilet paper stream through the night like shooting stars.
Welcome to Toilet Paper Night, in which the RiverDogs encourage fans to make a gigantic mess at the ballpark. Two thousand rolls are distributed at the end of the game, with the resulting team-approved vandalism turning Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park into a tissue bedecked mess.
“We create the opportunity to keep fans here longer on Saturday night,” said RiverDogs president Dave Echols. “And we guarantee it’s not gonna rain the night we do it. That’s the biggest thing.”
It tracks that it’s the Charleston RiverDogs who have pioneered this promotion, as the Single-A Tampa Bay affiliate has long had a reputation for absurd promotions. This penchant for the absurd is the natural byproduct of an ownership group that includes Mike Veeck and Bill Murray.
Echols, who has been with the team for over two decades, has a ready list of promotions that he’s been a part of. How about Nobody Night, when no fans were allowed in the ballpark until the game became official? Or maybe Vasectomy Night, a Father’s Day endeavor that was ultimately cancelled due to public outcry? Best of all, in his opinion, was staging the 2012 South Atlantic League Home Run Derby on the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier.
Toilet Paper Night debuted in 2021 as a tongue-in-cheek response to the toilet paper “shortage” that gripped the nation during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s one in a series of what RiverDogs senior vice president Ben Abzug calls “experiential promotions.”
“We made a conscious decision,” he said. “Instead of giving something away to 1,000 people, can we do something that everybody in the stands can be involved in? … The first one that I think of, we did Silly String Night [in 2017]. A brainchild of Nate Kurant, our former promotions guy. We gave 5,000 cans of Silly String out and after the game everybody crushed each other.
“Nate tells the story: His bank called him, because why would anybody order 5,000 cans of string and put it on their credit card? So, he had to prove that that was not fraud.”
Current promotions director Stephanie Keller, who joined the team prior to the 2025 season, didn’t have to deal with fraud concerns on Toilet Paper Night (the 2,000 rolls were donated by various team sponsors). She put the promotion back on the schedule this season after it didn’t appear in 2024, making it part of “Mischief Night” during a larger “Halfway to Halloween” homestand.
“I really wanted to create that visual for everybody to be included in an event postgame,” she said.
As the evening’s game, the second in a doubleheader, entered its final stages, Keller and a phalanx of employees and gameday staffers brought the boxes of toilet paper onto the concourse and began handing out rolls. On the videoboard a short video played reminding fans to wait until the game ended before throwing it, and to please not get the toilet paper stuck in the netting (most listened, some didn’t).
As for how fans should throw the toilet paper, Keller said that “you already have to have it unspooled a little bit and then you throw it up. … Keep throwing, keep throwing throughout the entire stadium, and decorate the lower bowl.”
And thus, over the course of a chaotic five minutes, the toilet paper ended up where it usually does: in the bowl. With the exception of an understandably disgruntled groundskeeper, muttering to himself as he tamped the dirt around home plate, a good time appeared to be had by all.
Director of operations Dan Knapinksi was among those in a good mood, even though he’d be the one overseeing the prodigious clean-up.
“If the fans like it, that’s what’s going to keep them coming back,” he said with a shrug. “So we’re all good with it if they’re all good with it.”
