Submissions for the Creative Non-Fiction category are open to one work of creative nonfiction completed for coursework in the last calendar year. Submissions should not exceed 20 pages. Allison Hampton wrote the 2nd place submission in the Creative Nonfiction Category for the 2026 President’s Writing Awards.
About Allison
Allie Hampton is a senior at Boise State and will graduate in May with a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies with focuses in Literature, Communication, Creative Writing, and Environmental Studies. She loves writing nonfiction – both personal and not and loves reading magical realism. This Fall, she will be pursuing a Masters degree in Environmental Management at Boise State where she hopes to bring creativity and storytelling to the environmental field. You can read another one of Allie’s stories in the 2025 Cabin Writer’s in the Attic anthology!
Winning Manuscript – America’s Past Time
One summer around 2005, I went to my first Dodger game. I have no memory of this, the same way I have no memory of my first time at church. One day, you gain consciousness, and without ever learning them, you know all the words to Take Me Out to the Ballgame and Jesus Loves Me.
Now I try to go to a game every summer with my dad. It’s different now that our family doesn’t live in Los Angeles anymore, but the rituals of watching a game with my dad still remain relatively unchanged every time I’m back.
“You know what would go great with this?” I said, two summers ago, the last time I was in Dodger Stadium. “A Cool-A-Coo.”
“Yes,” my dad said. He licked the top off his mouth, like he was pretending to get thick ice cream off his tongue, “A Cool-A-Coo.”
A Cool-A-Coo is the official ice cream sandwich of the Los Angeles Dodgers, or was up until 2016. It was vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two oatmeal cookies and dipped in chocolate.
A Dodger fan’s love of Cool-A-Coos is precious – buying one from a salesperson with a cooler walking up and down the stadium steps is a sacred ritual. In the early 90s, the Cool-A-Coo was first discontinued, and Dodger executives were met with outrage from fans across Los Angeles. And so the Cool-A-Coo returned.
But again in 1998, the O-Malley family sold the Dodgers to New Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who discontinued the Cool-A-Coo to make more money. Leo Politis, the original owner of Cool-A-Coos, ran the Los Angeles Dodgers ice cream sandwich empire along with just 30 other employees in a trailer office in Whittier, CA. Previously, he sold Cool-A-Coos to
Dodger stadium for 30 cents a piece, but Murdoch wanted Politis to sell the rights to the Dodgers so they could produce Cool-A-Coos at the stadium. For the Dodgers, this would mean more profits, but for Politis, this would mean he wouldn’t make any money. And so, the Cool-A-Coo went away.
After Murdoch, the Dodgers continued to be owned by Fox Entertainment Group, then Frank McCourt, but then in May of 2012, new owners took over. One of which was Stan Kasten, who’s first priority was to ask fans and employees what they missed at the stadium.
The Cool-A-Coo!!!!!!
By then, Politis had sold his company to Sweet Novelty, and they never re-made the Cool-A-Coo. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2012, Politis compared his situation to that of the O’Malley family when they sold the Dodgers to New Corp. A family could no longer compete with corporations. It was the same for the ice cream business.
It took nearly the entirety of the 2012 season for the Dodgers to negotiate the rights and perfect the Cool-A-Coo recipe, but the ice cream sandwich returned to the stadium during the 2012 postseason. For four sweet years, the Cool-A-Coo remained a stadium staple, but again disappeared from the stadium in 2016.
I don’t know why.
My love of Cool-A-Coos is a product of nostalgia. I don’t remember ever having them before we moved away, I don’t remember tasting them, I just know they are a part of Dodger iconography, and I miss them. I long for the Dodger Stadium that had Cool-A-Coos. I long to long for the past with my dad.
I like to imagine a past of Dodger stadium that was all about baseball. As a kid, I only thought about baseball and my family when I was at the stadium. In between innings, while I
watched 4 animated hats zoom around the screen, I was only focused on guessing which one had the baseball underneath. I didn’t notice it was presented by the brand of the Dodgers baseball caps, although that now seems like the only reason the Dodgers Hat Shuffle exists. I didn’t notice the advertisements below the scoreboard, I didn’t see the mechanisms of money all around me.
Baseball isn’t just a game. It’s also a business.
A business that my dad has bought into. My dad owns so many Dodger shirts, he could go weeks only wearing Dodger blue. His office shelves are lined with decades worth of bobble heads. My dad doesn’t just like baseball, he lives it… and part of the way he does that is representing his team in all forms. Hat, shirt, socks, phone case, keychain.
When my dad makes those purchases of Los Angeles Dodgers merchandise, a portion of the profits gets shared with all other teams in the National League. This is called revenue sharing. It applies to all merchandise sold outside of the local team stores and national media contracts. Like all businesses, baseball is full of confusing policy and bureaucracy, but revenue sharing is one way that the league tries to ensure equal accessibility to competition in Major League Baseball. When my dad watches the Dodger game on Spectrum, that’s through a local contract, so the revenue isn’t shared, but when he watches it on ESPN, which has a national contract, the revenue is shared. The idea is that all teams should benefit from the national deals, and this way there isn’t a situation of great economic disparity between teams with different media deals, in different locations.
The thought process is nice, but in practice, Major League Baseball is home to great economic disparity between teams. Teams like the New York Mets or the Dodgers have payrolls above $400 million, while The Marlins, Rays, and Athletics all come in under $90 million. This wealth gap isn’t just a problem for business relations, it’s a problem for the game. The teams
with the best managers, marketing, and historic publicity who make the money can invest more in their team. They can buy more resources, expand contracts for their players, and then play better. Then, new stars want to get contracted to those teams, and those teams have a lot of money for that new star’s contract. Then they play even better, get even more publicity, and then they get more money, and they play better, and the cycle repeats itself. The cycle is hard to break if you’re a team that, for various reasons, doesn’t have that money. Maybe there was a bad manager before now, maybe your home team tried to stay family-owned for too long. Maybe people in your town don’t watch the games on cable or buy local merch.
When my dad watches games on Spectrum or on ESPN, we have the same conversation each time. The camera does a close shot of one of the players and I say, “I hate the branding on the uniforms.”
And he says, “and those ads behind home plate?” “I know.”
My dad then says something along the lines of “It should just be about the team. The uniforms should just say Dodgers.”
I muse about how I don’t understand why they have to have these ads, even though I already know. My dad tells me it’s money.
In between the tv ad breaks, there are companies “presenting the Dodgers” when they come back on screen. Ads behind home plate, on the uniforms, in between every level of seats at the stadium.
I don’t remember any of that from when I was younger.
The debate about economic competition in baseball has been growing, and the Dodgers have been at the heart of it since Shohei Ohtani signed his $700 million contract in 2022, which was then the largest contract in professional sports history. (Now, the largest contract is held by a Mets player, Juan Soto, at $765 million). (Soto, however, is not at the heart of this debate… which to me points to some jealousy about our World Series championship in 2024…). The debate about individual salaries and contracts points to a much larger discussion in Major League Baseball, salary caps.
Unlike every other sports league in the United States, there is no cap on the salary a team can pay a ball player. That means that if the Dodgers and the Mets have upwards of $700 million dollars, and another team doesn’t, then the Dodgers and the Mets and other teams with the money will have the best players, and then be more likely to win the World Series. Lots of critics of the current system advocate that salary caps would solve this problem. This would mean that there would be a particular limit on the salary that a team could pay a player.
While I am sick of the money games in baseball, and wish it was just about the game, I don’t see a world where salary caps solve this problem of economic disparity. For example, if Shohei Ohtani was deciding between several contracts of the same price tag (in a world where this salary cap exists), I still think he would’ve ended up contracted to the Dodgers. Even if they are capped on salaries, the Dodgers still have more money than other teams – meaning they have better resources and better coaching. If a life-goal of mine was to win the World Series, like Ohtani, then regardless of salary, I’d probably still end up on a team like the Dodgers, with the most money. The problem here isn’t the salary or the media contract, it’s the American economic system that baseball operates within.
Look to the NFL, a league that does have salary caps… There is still the same problem of a few wealthy teams dominating competition. According to Forbes in 2025 (in an article that featured a photo of Shohei Ohtani and not Juan Soto), the NFL and the NHL have had just 10 different teams in championship over the last 10 years, while the MLB has had 14 different teams. Without a cap system, there is still more diversity in championship teams than in leagues that do have caps.
On top of this, a salary cap will almost certainly come with a salary floor. What happens when the salary floor that the players union negotiates is higher than what the Pirates and the Marlins currently pay? Wouldn’t that make their economic situation even worse? Would it make competition even worse?
I don’t like this system. I don’t think it is good. But a salary cap doesn’t close this revenue gap. Revenue sharing doesn’t either. The league’s collective bargaining agreement and luxury tax doesn’t close the gap.
I don’t think it’s a good thing for competition… but at the same time… business has to be part of the game. If you have the best baseball team in the world, people aren’t going to buy tickets to the games unless they’re marketed successfully. If the Dodgers can get my dad to buy every t-shirt and hat under the sun, or can cut the Cool-a-Coo, but still have fan retention, should there be something in place to prevent the best businessmen from having the best teams?
Business is a game as much as baseball is.
This economic gap is inevitable. There’s no policy that works to close it. No policy that would work to prevent it. You can tax the Dodgers as much as possible or put a salary cap on their players, but no matter what they exist within the confines of American capitalism. It is inevitable. The great wage gap between baseball teams is reflected in the wage gaps across the
United States and across the world. They cannot be done away with by one policy. These structures have been in place forever. The competition of baseball and business are inexplicably intertwined, and once you see it, you can’t stop. America’s great pastime cannot be separated from American greed and the American economy.
When I remember going to baseball games with my dad as a kid, I thought that baseball games were won in the moment. That each night, the team came together and tried their best to play the game. If they won, great. It’s not like that. There’s a whole machine working behind the scenes to structure the line up, to guarantee as many hits as possible. A whole baseball machine funded by the people walking up and down the stands, selling us an up-charged ice cream sandwich that is not oatmeal, is not dipped in chocolate, and is not made in Whittier, California.
There’s a real beauty in the managerial and coaching staff working behind the scenes to craft the right setting for a perfect game, but it is not nearly as magical.
I have this instinct to idealize the Dodgers’ past. That once upon a time, it wasn’t just a money game. It was good, clean, all-American baseball. I even have this instinct to idealize them now, and I do. This instinct to separate the Dodgers – the blue, the cold metal armrest, my family, the Hat Shuffle, the Hello Kitty bobblehead on my desk – from their owners, from the money, from politics.
And yet, the Dodgers historic economic and managerial accomplishments gave them the metrics for success in one of their great moments of political advocacy, with Jackie Robinson.
Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in Major League Baseball. He was signed by the Dodgers in 1947, and inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962. While it’s easy to think that the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson in a pure social justice initiative, they signed Jackie Robinson because he was (and is) one of the best players in baseball. And the Dodgers wanted to win.
The issue is – both things have to be true at the same time. The Dodgers had to have good money and good management to bring on Jackie Robinson. If a team like the Marlins signed on Jackie, they might not be able to afford the backlash, boycotting, and racist response from some fans. They had to have the management that could withstand loss or withstand backlash.
What that means is that it also has to be true that the team that had enough money to sign on the first Black Major League Baseball player would also be the team that had enough money to win the World Series in October of 2024. And then that team would be the one who got invited to the White House to celebrate their national victory alongside the same administration that ordered the Department of Defense to remove Jackie Robinson’s history serving in the US military. The same administration that redirected a Dodger hero’s history from the web page titled “Sports Heroes Who Served” to a new page, called “DEI Sports Heroes.” Both of these things have to be true at the same time.
Baseball is America’s pastime. It is our best and our worst.
As a kid, I was notorious for falling asleep everywhere. Walking up the stairs, sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch, my mom’s doctors appointments, and in the pale yellow seats at Dodger stadium. I don’t understand how or why I felt at home in all these public spaces, or safe enough to sleep, but I did. When you’re so tired in a public place like Dodger stadium, the cheering fades away into white noise, the cold metal of the armrest is comforting on your cheek, and the crisp night air only becomes more comfortable.
Once, I laid on my mom’s lap, wrapped in a fleece Dodger blanket, and I asked her, “when are we leaving?”
She said, “we live here now. Over there is your room.” She pointed across the way to the seats on the other side of the stadium. A sign below the seats advertised a 76 gas station.
I said, “Okay,” and thought only about how cold it would be to live at Dodger stadium.
I woke up in the backseat on the way home, looking up at streetlights through the window. The drive home from Dodger stadium is long the way every drive is long in LA. The way every car ride is long when you’re a kid, and have nothing to do besides listen to the sound of the game recap on the radio.