When I was younger one of the things I would always do before the baseball season started was check out the local convenience stores to find one of those pocket schedules.  I didn’t want them so I could know who the White Sox were playing when because I could just look in a newspaper to figure that out.  No, the reason I wanted the schedule was because it had a list of all the promotions and giveaways the team was doing during the season.  What’s that?  They’re handing out beach towels on June 15th?  I like the beach and I can’t go to the beach without a beach towel!  I’m gonna ask my dad if we can go to that game.

Of course, times have changed since I was a kid.  I no longer care about the promotions, though I still don’t mind free stuff, so my decisions on which games to attend generally have more to do with the game itself.  At the same time, with the economy in the shape it is at the moment free stuff has never been more important.  The problem is if you don’t have a job you can’t really afford to buy tickets to a game just to get a bobblehead doll.   Well, that is, unless your a New Jersey Nets fan.

From THE STAR LEDGER:

In a nod to current economic conditions, the basketball team will give unemployed fans who submit their resumes to the Nets Job Bank up to four free tickets, plus access to a Nov. 22 career fair at their home arena, team president and chief executive Brett Yormark said. The team also will distribute applicants’ resumes to its sponsors.

“Hopefully they’ll come out and experience the Nets, and then when times get better they’ll invest in us, because we invested in them,” Yormark said. “No other team is doing that, and I think it’s the appropriate thing to do, because times are tough.”

This is actually a very cool idea.  In the past year the state of New Jersey has lost over 20,000 jobs in both the public and private sector and with those 20,000 jobs come 20,000 people who no longer have a job.  Maybe if the Nets can’t find all of them jobs they can hire some of them to be seat fillers so the Izod Center can look full during games.

I do worry that the entire plan could backfire, though.  Losing your job is depressing enough, but having to be forced to sit and watch the Nets play basketball for a few hours on top of it could lead to mass suicide.