Sports Halloween Costumes for 2015 – Wall Street Journal

For the past six years, The Wall Street Journal has done society a noble service by providing parents with Halloween costume ideas for their children based on the least inspiring moments from the previous year in sports. Some years we have to dig deep to find enough suitable sports antiheroes to fill an entire display page. 2015 wasn’t one of those years. Here are this year’s “winners.”

The FIFA corruption scandal consumed headlines for most of the year, presenting any number of costume opportunities. But perhaps no image embodies this international-soccer nightmare more than the sight of FIFA president Sepp Blatter, at the podium in 2010, awarding the 2022 World Cup bid to Qatar. For added effect, make sure your child transfers large payments of candy to his friends in various installments.

Humans have long feared being attacked by machines: A cyborg army, a demonic television, or even a 1958 Plymouth Fury with a taste for homicide. So it’s no surprise that the Internet was set ablaze this August when a cameraman at the track and field world championships in Beijing lost control of his Segway and collided with Jamaican track star Usain Bolt. Thankfully, Bolt was fine. Also thankfully, a great two-child costume was born.

This is an ambitious two-child costume that requires careful choreography. One kid dresses as Los Angeles Dodgers second-baseman Chase Utley and spends the night of Halloween crashing into a friend dressed as New York Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada. The costume also calls on all adults nearby to feverishly debate the situation until any remaining sensible people have all gone home. Contact with second base isn’t required.

Do you have a pair of hyperactive, competitive kids who are always tussling? Do they happen to be millionaires many times over? If so, who better to portray for Halloween than Jonathan Papelbon and Bryce Harper, the Washington Nationals teammates who engaged in a little polite strangulation in the dugout during their team’s September collapse. It helps if your family likes one of the kids way more than the other.

The controversy known as “Deflategate” made little sense to anyone. Why was Tom Brady allegedly deflating balls? How much could the Patriots have benefited? And why, exactly, did he destroy his cellphone again? It also posed a tough question for the Journal: What’s the best way to capture this convoluted mess in costume form? After many weeks of debate, we figured an ensemble would work best. One baby dressed as a deflated football, another wearing UGGs and jackhammering a phone. Got three kids? Dress one as an air pressure gauge.

Some children don’t say much around adults. There has never been a Halloween sports costume expressly for them—until now. Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, whose notoriously cagey relationship with the media came to a head before last season’s Super Bowl, is the perfect costume target for your shyest ones. Some sample dialogue:

Q: Hi, little girl. Who are you dressed as?

A: Thanks for asking.

Q: What’s it like to be out trick-or-treating tonight?

A: I’m just here so I won’t get grounded.

Halloween came two weeks early in Ann Arbor, Mich., when Michigan punter Blake O’Neill mishandled a punt that cost the Wolverines a game against rival Michigan State. Like other horrifying, unforeseen events that left the townspeople trembling and screaming in disbelief, this one is excellent costume fodder. For added effect, have your child drop every candy bar on the ground, fail to fall on it and then try to pick it up again, only to toss it to a nearby kid dressed as a goblin.

Jason Pierre-Paul, the New York Giants’ defensive end, had a memorable Independence Day. While most of us were putting on our star-spangled pants and preparing to eat mountains of coleslaw, Pierre-Paul was looking forward to setting off a few metric tons of fireworks. In doing so, he sustained a serious hand injury that has kept him off the field. (Please remember to lecture your children about the dangers of firecrackers before dressing them as firecrackers.)