Roger has thrown out the ceremonial first pitch of the season twice, both night games, one in 1976, and one in 1995. He has also thrown out the first pitch of a regular season
game on July 30, 2005, making it the third time he has done the honors. However, this time, he tossed out two consecutive peanut bags from the mound to two different bat boys at home plate.

Would be an interesting record if that is the first time a first pitch has been thrown, but with something other than a baseball. Roger already holds the Major League Baseball record for the longest ceremonial first pitch of the season when he tossed the baseball from the loge level all the way to home plate in 1976.

The origins of the phrase “peanut gallery” aren’t definite but according to World Wide Words “it does have a theatrical origin, and goes back to America at the end of last century. The peanut gallery was the topmost tier of seats, the cheapest in the house, a long way from the stage. The same seats in British theatres were (and still are) often called “the gods” because you were so high you seemed to be halfway to heaven, up there with the allegorical figures that were often painted on the ceiling. On both sides of the Atlantic, these seats attracted an impecunious class of patron, with a strong sense of community, often highly irreverent and with a well-developed ability to heckle, hence the modern figurative meaning. A significant difference between the American and British theatres is that American patrons ate peanuts; these made wonderful missiles for showing their opinion of artistes they didn’t like.

Most Americans of a certain age will know the phrase because it was used in a slightly different sense in the fifties children’s television program, the Howdy Doody Show. There it was the name for the ground-level seating for the kids, the “peanuts”, though the phrase was almost certainly derived from the older sense. They were just as noisy and irreverent as their theatrical forebears, or indeed the groundlings of Shakespeare’s time, with a liking for low humor and a total lack of sense or discrimination.”

World Wide Words- copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2005.- copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2005.

Welcome. Right off the top, I’d like to thank you for visiting. After having the simple .html version of “The Peanut Gallery” online for a while, I decided to give it a more fitting and personable home on this blog. I also realized I hadn’t been adding much to it. So now I have no excuse. It’s a blog, afterall, a growing, flowering little…ok, enough of the violin background music. Let’s get right to it.

Actually, I’d rather have you decide the point of this blog, so how about you take a guess why this blog is here??

“The Peanut Gallery” is taking up valuable bandwidth/server space on this wonderous, spinning planet because:
A) The technology is available and that’s good enough for me.
B) Because this blog is a growing, flowering, little…
C) Roger likes the extra attention.
D) Roger deserves to have a site so dedicated, cool, informative, professional-looking, and filled with invaluable information and trivia about him and his amazing story.

The correct answer is, of course, D).

Actually, it is exciting and an honor to be able to share with you as much fun facts, cool links, and entertaining stories about Roger Owens, the Famous Peanut Man at Dodger Stadium, his family, and his family of friends and fans, as chronicled in the book “The Perfect Pitch” and as contributed here further on this blog.

So, enjoy yourself here at ”The Peanut Gallery” as much as you would on a swaying hammock by the beach, or listening to your fan hum in steady oscillation on a warm, lazy, Sunday afternoon with the Dodger game on TV or on your portable radio.