The Minor League Baseball regular season ended over Labor Day weekend. For Erik Mertens, better known as “Erik The Peanut Guy,” the end of the season is a much needed reprieve.
Mertens is the Director of Fan Experience and Community Relations for the Tri City Dust Devils, a Minor League Baseball affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. He serves as the on-field host, interacts with fans between innings and tosses bags of peanuts.
The Dust Devils just finished their 25th anniversary season with 66 games. For Mertens, that means weekends, late nights and a summer packed with baseball.
He started in the peanut booth in 2001 in his early 20s with another “Peanut Guy,” who later moved on to other jobs. Mertens stayed, and slowly, his prominence grew.
“That first season at the games, people would recognize me,” Mertens said. “The past five or ten years… it’s kind of weird to say, but I get recognized everywhere.”
From the moment you walk from the parking lot to Gesa Stadium in Pasco, Wash., you’ll immediately recognize that Erik is part of the fabric of the organization.
A fan will find The Peanut Guy at the gates before they open, counting down the seconds until the festivities begin, and when it hits zero, he uses a bullhorn to signal the gates are open. From there, fans see a life-size bobblehead of Erik the Peanut Guy to their right as they walk in. To their center, the actual Peanut Guy is juggling and greeting everyone as they walk through.
It is no surprise that Mertens has become entrenched in the rich baseball culture of the Tri-Cities. His parents, Ed and Mary Jo Mertens, started taking Erik to minor league baseball games when he was a baby.
His parents first took him to McDermott Field in Idaho Falls, Idaho, home of the Idaho Falls Chukars. That became just the first of hundreds of ballparks Erik would visit, but the journey did not start right away.
In 2003, Mertens visited Providence Park in Portland, Oregon, home of the Portland Beavers. Around the same time, Ed gave Erik his first on-field cap – a Seattle Mariners hat.
“I just fell in love with hats, and the fun logos and colors,” Erik said.
Shortly after, Erik bought a giant poster with all the minor league hats. He’d spend a lot of time with his dad looking at different hats and where the stadiums were. From there, he started collecting hats from every stadium he visited and he’d display them on a wall of his home.
This year, Mertens completed a journey to visit 305 baseball fields and stadiums across the U.S. and Canada. He now has 700 hats, including one, or more, hats from every field he has visited.
The ballpark list includes the 119 active Minor League ballparks (there are 120 teams, but the Palm Beach Cardinals and the Jupiter Hammerheads share a park), nearly two dozen inactive Minor League fields, 39 Major League stadiums, five Negro League ballparks or sites, nine independent league ballparks and 14 college wood-bat stadiums.
“If you want to love your country, drive across it,” Mertens said. “I think if you want to, like, fall in love with your country, visit different minor league ballparks.”
On the surface, some may look at that list and call it an obsession. For Mertens, his love of baseball and his journey goes much deeper than that.
He said his dad, Ed, taught him everything he knows about baseball. From swinging a bat to playing catch. Even that is just scratching the surface.
Ed loved to go to Dust Devils games. When he did, he often watched Erik perform. What most people didn’t know at the time is how Ed created a tradition that turned into a legacy.
Every time Ed came to a game at the Pasco park, he scanned the crowd and identified a fan who needed a boost. Maybe it was a kid, or a parent struggling to keep their composure, or a fan with a disability. Once Ed found his target, he’d leave his seat, go to the team store and buy a piece of merchandise – a minibat, a team baseball, a plushie of the team mascot, “Dusty,” – with his own money. Then he’d return to his seat, wave Erik down, and give Erik the souvenir to give to the fan.
Ed never took credit.
“I'd be like, well come with me, Dad, you're the one that bought it,” Erik said. “He's like, ‘I don't want them to know it's from me. You can say it's from you or the Dust Devils team, whatever, he doesn’t need to know it's from me.’”
Ed died in 2017. Yet, when he passed, fans began giving Erik money, because they read in Ed’s obituary that became an anonymous gift giver at Dust Devils games.
Erik didn’t know what to do with the money. So, he went to team president Derrel Ebert.
“When Ed was alive, it was at least one or two [gifts] per night,” Ebert said. “After Ed passed, it became, how do we continue this? The Dust Devils helped fund a little early on with all of Erik’s travels, he’s had an opportunity to share it with other people.”
The money became “Ed’s fund.” Now, even years later, the tradition continues
Mertens said that everything he does is in honor of his father. From the “Peanut Guy” persona to traveling to stadiums, it’s all because of Ed.
“It permeates my travels,” Mertens said. “When I go to Knoxville, Tenn., or Kannapolis, N.C., I can still feel my dad there when I meet someone who wants to connect or buy a souvenir for a kid.”
At the end of a long season, Erik is running on fumes. He never lets it show when showtime arrives, but he said he often calls on his dad when the noise stops.
“Every night during the National Anthem, that’s the one time where everything is quiet and everyone stands up, I look out at these hills south of Kennewick that you can see south of Gesa Stadium, I think of my dad.”
After 25 years of tossing peanuts, engaging with fans, acting as a gift giver, and finally completing his journey to visit all the ballparks, Mertens doesn’t expect much to change.
“This is literally my favorite thing I get to do in life," Mertens said.