Good and evil clashed in a momentous battle at MCU Park on July 23, and it was not the hometown Brooklyn Cyclones against the hated Staten Island Yankees — it was the Jedi versus the Sith. A Star Wars-themed space opera played out in between innings, culminating when more than four-dozen lightsaber-wielding combatants duked at the end of the game — and the good guys won with the help of the crowd’s Jedi mind tricks, one organizer said.
“We judge how well we do with a call and response at the end, and we got the whole crowd into it,” Empire Saber Guild local director Rubin Polizzy said. “They used the Force to mind trick the bad guys into giving up and leaving the field — it went really great.”
The drama started when the evil Sith — led by supreme baddie Darth Vader — marched out on the field at the beginning of the game and demanded to know where Jedi hero Obi-Wan Kenobi was hiding (he was buying Cyclones merch). He and his henchmen captured Jedi during the course of the game and rounded them up for a cruel execution at the end of the matchup, but Obi-Wan showed up with two dozen warriors of his own and dropped them faster than a case of stolen spice at an Imperial Customs checkpoint.
Polizzy’s group teaches lightsabers and puts on dramatic melees to raise money for charities. The group raffled off two prop lightsabers during the game to raise $2,100 for Saint Mary’s Hospital for Children in Queens.
The Cyclones must have been feeling the crowd’s positive energy as well — the squad routed the visiting Aberdeen IronBirds 7–2 with the help of catcher Darryl Knight’s three-run homer in the bottom of the eighth inning.
