For 27 years, the Philadelphia Phillies had one of the best hot dog deals in the nation: “Dollar Dog Night,” which delivered exactly what that sounds like.
But this week, the baseball team officially did away with its inflation-buster, single-handedly raising the cheapest hot dog price by 150%. Dollar Dog Nights have been replaced with the not-quite-as-catchy Hatfield Phillies Franks BOGO Nights, when fans will be able to buy two dogs for $5. There are two BOGO nights scheduled for this upcoming season, April 2 and April 16.
Sure, you could blame inflation for the new surge pricing—but the team’s head of ticketing is blaming badly behaved fans who last year went viral for throwing their food toward the field and in the stands at an April game. Plenty of fans were ejected from the game for unruly behavior. Some 58,000 dogs were sold that night, according to local media.
“It wasn’t just the throwing,” John Weber, senior vice president of Phillies ticket operations and projects, told the Associated Press. “But obviously, you know, the throwing was a little bit of a tipping point.”
“Our goal is to always give a great fan experience,” Weber told the outlet. “If you were there at the game, it was not a great experience.”
What is really making fans aghast, on the other hand, is the end to dollar dogs, reacting with the same vitriol and disbelief as they did two years ago when the Phillies first tried to reduce Dollar Dog Nights from three to two. (That last incident even got Sen. Bob Casey involved after a sportswriter tweeted for fans to “call your congressman.”)
Replies of disapproval flooded into the Phillies’ X announcement Thursday. “There’s only so much heartbreak a fan base can endure,” one user posted on X. “This is an outrage,” posted another. A Change.org petition to bring back the dollar dog garnered 6,500 signatures as of Friday afternoon.
“If they enforce the buy-one get-one, I will be outside of the stadium in a hot dog suit with a sign protesting for dollar dogs,” petition author Christian McGovern told local station WPVI.
“Hot dogs are for the people, by the people,” one supporter says in a petition video. “Give the people their hot dogs, without capitalism infringing on their dog rights.”
The AP even spotted a local merchant selling a T-shirt reading, “RIP dollar dog night.”
“Pork flew. Heads rolled,” it said.
Last year’s hot dog incident wasn’t even the worst example of fan misbehavior by Philly’s baseball fans, who at one point were voted the worst sports fans on the planet by GQ. “Philadelphia stadiums house the most monstrous collection of humanity outside of the federal penal system,” GQ writer Adam Winer declared, listing incidents in which Phillies and Eagles fans booed their own winning team and an athlete who had recently received a hand transplant, as well as threw snowballs and various objects at Santa Claus. In one notorious incident, a Phillies fan deliberately vomited on an off-duty cop and his daughter during a Phillies-Nationals game.
But maybe the hot dog price hike isn’t really punishment after all. The AP noted that the deal was initially rolled out in the ’90s to boost attendance for a mediocre team; with the Phillies’ performance improving, they may not need dirt-cheap dogs to encourage attendance. The team had 3 million fans buy tickets in 2022, according to the AP, and sold on average nearly 7,000 hot dogs per game.