Once upon a time there was a cup. This cup allowed people to put their beverage of choice in it and travel from the beverage source to any other place that they wanted without fear of losing the contents within. Gone were the days of cupping one’s hands together to get a drink from the well or filling a gourd, cow stomach or other container with liquid.

And while the cup was good, and practical, it was not living up to its full potential. That is until the cup became known as the souvenir cup.

Travel to most any sporting event or other event of note and odds are one will be exposed to a souvenir cup of some sort. This cup is usually larger than its other cup brethren and includes features like reuseability and serves as a reminder to all who see it that the holder of said cup was at the sporting event it depicts.

I am not sure when I first caught the souvenir cup bug but over the past few years I have accumulated quite the collection of plastic cups from various venues. There are three things I try to collect from every ballpark that I visit. The first is a ticket stub. The second is a game program. And the third is, you guessed it, a souvenir cup.

I was given several Souvenir cups from the Washington Redskins during the early 80’s and while I still have them, I do not really count them as part of my collecting history since they were not actually collected by me. As near as I can recall my first souvenir cups that were collected by me were ICEE cups from Tinker Field in Orlando, FL. While not being specifically made for the team I was watching, these cups featured each of the Major League teams and also had the added bonus of containing ICEE inside.

My cup collecting was not limited to ICEE cups however. Once I got to college I soon added many University of Central Florida cups to the collection. One could argue that plastic cups would serve the struggling college student well but I had plenty of actual glasses in my cabinets so the cups were manly turned into display pieces and were in no means used for the purpose they were intended.

Fast forward past college, and the cup collecting was accelerated by trips to various minor and major league baseball parks. Every time I visited a new ballpark I made sure to get a souvenir cup. But I did not always stop at a single cup to stadium ratio. Often each time I visited the same stadium I would end up getting a cup until my pantry turned into a sea of plastic. In my defense some teams would put out several different versions of cups over the course of the season.

Some of the more unique cups are on display in various areas of my office and home while the rest are in static display in the pantry. Now and again I will take the cups down and look at each of them as an archeologist would study some relic of a long lost society. The cups serve as a time capsule, both for the state of sports marketing and cup technology of the time, as well as showing glances at who was considered the star player at the time the cup was issued.

The star player portion is more limited to the Major League cups as opposed to the Minor Leagues due to the frequency in which players move through the minor leagues. The past few seasons the Astros have also moved away from featuring players on their cups. One could argue that they are also avoiding highlighting players who will not be on the team long.

One particular pet peeve of mine involves the Houston Astros and their lack of souvenir cups at their Spring Training facility. This will be the first year under new ownership and there is a new logo for the team so perhaps this will be the year that the souvenir cups appear but having gone to the ballpark for the past few years and not getting a cup I am not holding out much hope for a change this year. Every other Spring Training game I have attended, away from the Astros home field, has had a souvenir cup of some kind. So it is not like Spring Training cups are a foreign concept.

While most of my cups were purchased there is another approach that can be employed by the savvy cup collector. While I am in no way encouraging ballpark dumpster diving, often times people will leave their precious cups in the cup holder or other areas around their seats when they leave. So, if you don’t feel like buying one, and the idea of carrying out a cup with someone else’s back wash in it doesn’t creep you out, then by all means grab a few cups on the way out. You are helping ensure that the ballpark cleaning crew has fewer cups to clean up. You are also helping the environment as well by keeping the cups out of the landfill. I have only employed this technique once when I was at Tropicana Field in 2009. I knew that it would be a few years before I would make it back there and while I had already purchased one cup I happened to see a different cup on the way out and decided it was worth adding to the collection.

This brings up another aspect of the souvenir cup hierarchy, different cups for different types of drinks. Many ballparks will have a different cup for the alcoholic and non alcoholic beverages to help ensure that underage patrons are not walking around drinking things that they shouldn’t be. So in the event that there are multiple cup types I suppose a cup scavenging approach could be warranted to ensure that you left with a full set.

I actually tried to discover when souvenir cups first appeared on the scene but sadly I was unable to locate a source that said, “behold the birth of the souvenir cup.” Short of that I guess one can assume that as long as there have been cups there have been souvenir versions of them. Perhaps archeologists can discover the Rosetta Cup deep in some pyramid or other area to shed further light on the subject.

So there you have it, the pros and cons of souvenir cup collecting. It can be a relatively inexpensive way to bring home a little bit of that ballpark experience while providing much needed hydration during the game. Plus, the cups are stackable which certainly helps when it comes time to store them.

Now if you will excuse me, all of this talk about cups as made me thirsty and in need of some water.

Copyright 2013 R. Anderson