Can you measure fan loyalty by the number of plastic baubles you buy?
Make that bauble a bobblehead, and maybe you can.
The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee says the response to its specialty bobbleheads celebrating the Cleveland Cavaliers 2016 NBA championship has been “overwhelming.”
Our sister publication, Crain's Cleveland Business, notes that there has been more demand for Cavs bobbleheads than it has seen for any other championship team since championship items went into production in the early 2000s.
Thanks to the demand, the Hall of Fame is adding more items, such as bobbleheads of the Cavs' mascots and a custom bobblehead of LeBron James, with a net around his neck, holding a replica of a newspaper with the championship news in the headline.
Final designs are still under way, so there are just renderings of the bobbleheads available so far. Don't expect a photorealistic LeBron on your own bobblehead, even if you pay $850 for the 3-foot-tall version.
The bobbleheads are made by Forever Collectibles, which also makes collectible items for other teams in the NBA along with the NFL, NHL and major league baseball.
And if, at some point while reading this you've thought: Wait. There's a National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum? The answer to that is … not quite yet. The founders hope to open a museum by the end of this year, although there's was a three-month preview exhibit in Milwaukee featuring the largest assembly of bobbleheads ever gathered in one place earlier this year, according to organizers.
And one last tidbit to consider before we leave these custom plastic collectibles: Pete Rose may be banned from the Baseball Hall of Fame, but in April he was the first to be inducted into the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame, winning 95 percent of the votes in an online poll.
I'm sure Cooperstown is shaken up that it missed out.
