The Swamp Shop recently unveiled its new merchandise for fans looking to support the Mud Hens this season.

“About 90 percent of the merchandise is new,” said Craig Katz, director of merchandise and licensing for the Toledo Mud Hens.

The new rotation of merchandise includes new hats, as well as 15 new T-shirts and 25 new sweatshirts, which are all listed on the store website, swampshop.milbstore.com.

“The new merchandise is already ready to go. It’s already in the store as well as the online store,” Katz said. “We expect the sweatshirts to sell well this year with it being as cold as it’s been.”

The women’s and children’s merchandise has also been completely redone to include the new merchandise.

“Almost the entire kids and ladies line is brand new items,” Katz said.

Another new addition to the shop is the line of Under Armor products. Katz projects this line of apparel will sell well this season.

“They are a well-known brand that fans have been looking for,” Katz said. “This is the first year being licensed with Major League and Minor League Baseball.”

Under Armor is a popular brand among athletes as well as fans.

Another line of apparel projected to sell well is the ‘Holy Toledo’ line. The line consists of four T-shirts at the moment, but there is potential for expanding at a later date, Katz said.

“It appeals to all Toledo natives, not just baseball and hockey fans,” he said.

A staple that sells well is typically the baseball caps, a necessity for many baseball fans, Katz said.

“This year we’re introducing a new flat-bill snapback,” Katz said. “And our batting practice caps always sell well.”

The flat-bill snapback style caps are becoming popular with many sports fans, and come in a variety of styles.

Some merchandise has already sold well, both online and in the store locations.

According to Katz, items such as the youth Nike Henley jersey, the red Pep Rally zip hoodie, the heather grey Diner hoodie, the official logo T-shirt and the New Era batting practice Diamond Era cap have all sold well recently.

Hours for the Swamp Shop at Fifth Third Field is 11 a.m.to  5 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. The Swamp Shop at Huntington Center will be open until hockey season is over. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.

Other Swamp Shop locations — Swamp Shop Express and Tackle Box at the Huntington Center and the Hen Hut at Fifth Third Field — are open only during games.

Longtime Toledo Mud Hens broadcaster Jim Weber said being inducted this year into the International League Hall of Fame is humbling.

“Anytime you get inducted into any hall of fame you’re either retired or dead,” said Weber during a phone interview from Florida. “And I’m neither of those.”

Weber is certainly alive and shows no signs of slowing down. He’s headed into his 40^th season with the Mud Hens.

“It takes seven years to get 1,000 games in so I tell everybody I’m going to take [future games] 1,000 at a time,” Weber joked. “There’s no goal. Fifty years would be nice. And it’s a job that you don’t mind going to every day.”

Indeed, Weber called his 5,000 consecutive game in his 39^th season last year, the longest tenure of any announcer in the International League.

Team historian John Husman found that no other announcer could match Weber’s record. The closest he could find were Detroit’s Ernie Harwell, who missed two games between 1960 and 2002, Harry Caray, who called more than 6,000 consecutive games between 1945 and 1987 but for four different teams, and Toronto’s Tom Cheek, who had 4,306 consecutive games from 1977 to 2004.

“It is very likely that Jim Weber has done more consecutive scheduled broadcasts, for the same team, than anyone else ever has, major or minor league,” Husman said in a news release. “Comparisons are difficult, especially for the minor leagues, but it appears that Jim Weber’s streak is unmatched.”

Just because he never missed a game doesn’t mean he was never sick, Weber said.

“I had sick games when I could barely make it through,” he said. “I’d get a throat infection and couldn’t talk too well and muscle it out. I did a doubleheader in Denver just above a whisper.”

Weber was raised in South Toledo and attended Bowsher High School. He dabbled in radio in 1969 and then started helping a friend announce high school football and basketball games. By the mid-1970s, he helped arrange radio agreements for the Mud Hens and in 1975 became the team’s play-by-play announcer.

Weber has been a constant with the franchise. Since 1975, 18 managers and more than 1,000 players have passed through the organization.

In addition to his radio duties, Weber broadcasts on TV and has been the team’s traveling secretary since 1984. He has also covered games for Bowling Green State University.

“The things that make Jim so amazing as a broadcaster is his passion for the game,” said Mud Hens broadcaster Matt Melzak in an email.  “You can tell it in his voice how much he cares for the sport, its players and fans. It comes through each and every broadcast.

“One great thing that I have learned from Jim is the timing in a broadcast. He has such a great feel of how to work in a story to a broadcast. Whether it is through something historical about the team, its players, the ballpark or the city, he is able to weave that into the game without losing what is going on in the game itself.”

Weber is the first announcer to be inducted into the International League Hall of Fame. Joining him this year are infielder/outfielder Jeff Manto and manager Dave Miley.

Weber considers the Mud Hens’ back-to-back Governor’s Cup championships in 2005 and 2006 his career highlight.

“I never thought I’d see one, but I saw two in a row,” Weber said. “It was in my 31^st  year. It took that long before we won a championship. Lots of those guys are in the major leagues now. That was the highlight. Now I have two rings to show for it.”

Weber said he’s most proud of the fact that he hasn’t missed a game in his career and that he’s a local guy in a franchise that sees a lot of employees from outside Toledo.

“I think if you looked at all our organization there’s not a lot of people from our area,” Weber said. “They have careers, they move on, they come from other places. There’s not a lot of natives in there — there are some but a lot of them are from somewhere else.”

He’s also seen two generations of employees grow up – the league president, Randy Mobley, was an intern for Columbus when Weber was broadcasting years ago. If he sticks around a few more years, he’ll see a third generation, he said.

Weber has lived in Perrysburg for the past eight years. He has two daughters and two grandchildren.

The Mud Hens will honor Weber with a bronze statue at a home game May 29. He said he doesn’t necessarily like the attention and can’t wait for the ceremony to be over so he can focus on his announcing.

“After this year, things will quiet down and get back to normal,” he said.

Social media and smartphone use has grown in popularity to the point where a majority of users are on their phones all the time — whether they are watching the Oscars, the Super Bowl or a baseball game, said Nathan Steinmetz, manager of online marketing for the Toledo Mud Hens.

That “second-screen mentality” is why Steinmetz is excited for a new Minor League Baseball (MiLB) app set to debut by Opening Day.

The free app, Inside the Park, was developed by Boomaphone, a subsidiary of sports marketing company Brandiose, in partnership with MiLB and will include all 160 minor league teams, including the Mud Hens.

“You walk around our games the past few years and you’ll see that everyone’s on their phone, whether they are checking their Twitter or texting their friends or posting their own photos on Instagram. It’s happening everywhere,” Steinmetz said.

“At any of these big events that everybody watches, that second-screen mentality is you’ve got your phone out and you’re following along on Twitter to see what everybody else is saying or you’re getting engaged and putting your own thoughts and jokes out there. It’s happening at home and it’s happening at our games. This app is a perfect culmination of all those things and we think it’s going to be really great.”

Each team will supply its own inning-by-inning content for the app, which will be available for both iPhone and Android users.

“We’re confident it will be up and operational on Opening Day or soon thereafter,” Steinmetz said. “Realistically it will probably take us a homestand or two to work through the kinks. But it should be really cool.”

The app is expected to serve as a “companion piece” to the fan experience, Steinmetz said.

“It lets fans know what special events might be happening before the game, what promotions will be happening during the game and what’s happening after the game, if there’s fireworks or any special events worth sticking around for,” Steinmetz said.

App users can vote on mascot races, sign up for promotions, earn points and reward coupons, interact through social media accounts, explore the ballpark via an interactive map and more, said app developer Jason Klein of Boomaphone.

The app will use geolocation to recognize what ballpark the user is in and pull up that feed, Steinmetz said. The user can also manually switch to a different ballpark, Klein said.

“This is connecting the ballpark experience in a way that’s never been done before,” Klein said. “It completely enhances the fan experience.”

All the Mud Hens social media platforms will be integrated into the app, so fans following the game will get Facebook posts, tweets and Instagram posts from the Mud Hens within the app.

Fans can also sign into their own social media platforms using the app. Photos, tweets and statuses shared via the app will automatically get a game hashtag that will be searchable and viewable by the Mud Hens and other fans at the game as well as your own friends, Steinmetz said.

“The idea is that if people are here, they can just have this app up the entire time and do everything they would want to do from the app,” Steinmetz said.

Steinmetz said he also hopes the app will help fans take control of their game experience.

“There are events happening all over the concourse and if you walk in the wrong gate, you might not walk by it,” Steinmetz said. “People might not know the mascots sign autographs in the seventh inning because they sit over there and have no reason to come over here for example. So we’re hoping this really helps people increase the value of their ticket and be able to experience more.”

Last year, seven minor league teams participated in a pilot program with the app, including the Buffalo Bisons and Lehigh Valley IronPigs of the International League.

“One of the teams came to us so we built a minor league baseball app from the ground up,” Klein siad. “We’re not bringing this over from any other sport or business. It was designed specifically for minor league baseball fans. We took a lot of notes and a lot of feedback from the teams last year and the app will be way better than last year.”

Many minor league fans are more interested in promotional events than baseball stats, Steinmetz said.

“Sports information is important, but our philosophy has always been that’s part of it,” he said. “Some people just want to know, ‘Is SpongeBob going to be at the game today? Are there fireworks tonight?’ That’s what this app is. Twenty percent of the screen is taken up with information on the game and the rest is information about what’s going on and that’s what most people are here for.”

Steinmetz said he’s excited to use the app both as his job and as a fan.

“They get what we’re all about — the differences between our fans and fans of other sports and even of the major leagues,” Steinmetz said of Boomaphone. “They get how it’s all about fun and entertainment here and that’s all built into the app.”

Social media users comprise all age groups, from children to seniors, Steinmetz said.

“It’s getting to the point where just about everyone’s using it,” Steinmetz said. “A good example is the Throwback Thursday hashtag. We’ve been taking advantage of our storied history and sharing some of our old photos from our archives.”

Each week, the Hens get responses from fans who remember attending games at Swayne Field and Ned Skeldon Stadium.

“The conversations that come out of that are amazing. We get incredible engagement from it,” Steinmetz said. “Right there is a great example of how social media has reached across all age groups and our messaging has changed a little bit to reflect that.”

Because the app is made by Minor League Baseball, it won’t transfer to the Walleye, but it’s something the team would be interested in offering in the future, Steinmetz said.

“It’s that second-screen mentality coming right into our ballpark. That’s where we’re at now,” Steinmetz said. “It all kind of comes together, that you can communicate with other people, you can communicate with the team, you can get news and information — all from your seat. It’s pretty cool.”

Jake Tyler’s job is to see to it the Mud Hens aren’t, strictly, muddy.

Add his job to the list of those made harder by the winter nobody’s sorry to see gone.

Making sure the “Field” part of Fifth Third Field is ready for the Mud Hens’ home opener is generally a laidback job — aerate the soil, add a layer of sand, spread fertilizer on the grassy parts, mow it a couple times.

Add up to 16 inches of snow and ice, though …

“Normally we’ve got four weeks to get two weeks [worth of] work done,” Tyler said, laughing. “Now we had three weeks to get a month and a half worth of work done.”

Normally, snow protects the grass and ground from the worst of the winter cold, then melts in the spring, helping to thaw and warm the ground.

“Definitely not a normal year,” said Tyler, whose official job title is sports turf manager for the Mud Hens. “Depends on how you define normal, I guess.”

The ground froze, and froze deep. Snow and ice piled up — about 16 inches in the part of the field that, until about April when the sun traces a high-enough arc in the sky, gets no direct sunlight at all.

Even on the day before spring officially started, parts of the ballpark’s loading dock was piled deep with snow — snow that had to be shoveled from the field by hand, by a crew of eight men, because the deep-frozen ground was too fragile to use heavy equipment.

And the limited sunlight and near-zero evening temperatures meant there were only a few hours each day to get that work done without causing more damage to the ground.

“It took some ingenuity” to work around that, Tyler said.

That ingenuity included putting one of the infield tarps to unexpected use as a hothouse of sorts, to melt the 16 inches of snow and ice shielded by the stadium walls from the low winter sun.

The tarp was spread atop the ice, its edges weighted down with piled-on snow. Then two industrial-sized space heaters were set up at either end, their exhaust hoses stuck under the edges. The two heaters put out a total of a 1 million British Thermal Unit (BTU), Tyler said. (Just to compare, the space heater that’s been under your desk all winter might be about 5,000 BTU, tops.)

Those two heaters ran three days straight, keeping the temperature under the tarp in the 70s even as the outside temperature passed zero on the way down, before the ice and snow melted, Tyler said.

All that got Tyler and his crew — which includes full-time assistant Cory Myers and, in a “normal” year, two other crewmen — to the point at which they could think about doing the things they usually do to prepare the field: tilling to aerate the clay parts, fertilizer on the grass, the first pass with the mowers.

It’s about more than having a field that looks good, Tyler said. There are plenty of stories about how dirt that’s not firm enough can cause a player to lose his footing, or cause a ball to take a bad hop and injure someone.

“Our goal is to have a safe field for the players. We don’t want to cause any injuries,” he said.

And then there’s the intangible effect of walking into a baseball stadium, through the gates and up to the seats and catching that first glimpse of the playing field.

For the fans, Tyler said, “walking out to that field and seeing the green grass makes it feel like spring even if it’s not.”