Mascots That I Am Forced to Obsess Over Until the Dodgers Get a Fucking Hand on the Ball
The Dodgers don’t have a mascot, apart from Brooklyn and Brix, Oklahoma City’s very loveable but deeply gendered cattle dogs, and whatever this is, which the administration has officially classified as “a unique performance character.”
Therefore, I am forced to pine after all the weird and incredible mascots that lurk elsewhere in the MLB.
Baltimore Orioles: The Mascot Who Emerged Like The Count of Monte Cristo To Steal A Title From The Mets
There appears to be some sort of dispute over the origins of the Baltimore Orioles’ mascot. Its current iteration which is literally only referred to as “The Bird,” was theatrically hatched out of an egg in the 70s (which apparently NOBODY bothered to photograph) but before that there was a Mr. Oriole who, because it was 1955, looked like a Victorian child’s fevered nightmare. One brave soul came forward with this information for the sole purpose of unseating Mr. Met as the official earliest MLB costumed mascot. Don’t ask about the chimpanzee I have no information about the chimpanzee.
Colorado Rockies: Dinger, Who Doesn’t Get The Respect He Deserves
The Bird is not the only mascot to have been introduced via gigantic egg gimmick! Meet Dinger, who has my entire heart.
Now THAT is how you mascot. Dinger apparently has an ardent subset of Rockies fans who absolutely hate him and want him extinguished from baseball history but I think that just adds to his charm.
Milwaukee Brewers: The Dog That Launched a Thousand Conspiracy Theories
The Brewers should be lauded for their realization that nobody can actually stop them from having as many mascots as they want, including Bernie Brewer™, Barrelman and the Famous Racing Sausages®.
My favorite Brewers mascot is one that nobody planned for: a stray, fluffy white dog who wandered into the Brewers’ Phoenix spring training camp and changed the franchise forever. After no owner could be found, the team named the pup Hank after Hank Aaron and christened him a Brewer for life.
Hank is an adorable dog, one of whose several bobbleheads may or may not be currently sitting in my apartment. He’s a crowd favorite and for years he would attend games but these days he’s retired, lives with a family and only comes in every once in a while to cheer on his team or be featured in their Back to the Future-themed videos.
The best thing about Hank, though, is how often the Brewers are forced to make a statement insisting that he is alive and well and has not been secretly replaced with a dogpelgänger. Some fans truly believe Hank has been given the ol’ Avril Lavigne treatment and have side-by-side photos they claim prove that we are officially on our second Hank.
When SB Nation’s Brewers blog Brew Crew Ball shared the story, it essentially created an all-hands-on-deck Hank panic in Milwaukee that resulted in the team having to issue this tweet:
These baseball men with real baseball jobs were forced to halt all other business to wheel Hank out and verify that he’s very much alive. They even had Hank’s vet come and verify his dental records, so badly did they want people to stop tweeting conspiracy theories about the ballpark pup. The next day they even had a second vet verify that his microchip was the same as the one that had been implanted when he was adopted in the first place. The President of the Wisconsin Humane Society even took time to weigh in with her theory on why Hank might look a bit different now, which is roughly the same reason the people on Survivor don’t look the same when they come back for the reunion show as they did when they were spending full days scratching at each others’ faces for a single abalone or whatever they do on that show. Namely: you’d probably look different too if you went from living on the streets to essentially running a baseball franchise with your two little paws.
Kansas City Royals: The Mutant That God Forgot
Ok, the first thought that I have to address is simply: what the fuck is going on with Slugger’s… bone crown? Crown that’s been fused into his skull? Multiple vertical proboscises? Whatever it is, I hate it.
It turns out that my knee-jerk reaction to this guy and his shifty pointed skull situation was in fact dead on because Sluggerrr (yes they make you spell it like that) is potentially the only Major League Baseball mascot to have been dragged into a court of law. Before I tell you the story though please take a second to reflect on how angry this Google suggestion made me.
Anyway, one time Sluggerrr was doing his classic hot-dog-toss-into-the-crowd thing and wouldn’t you know it he accidentally ruined a guy’s entire eyeball. The entire story by the KC Star is just some brilliant reporting but here are the highlights.
Did they have to include this image in the article? It looks like he’s saying “and I’d do it again, too!”
Sluggerrr was pretty quick to say that it was in fact his boss who told him to start putting some vinegar on his weiner launches.
For his part, the defendant, who may have more right than anyone to be anti-hot dog toss, was still open to them as a concept.
Cleveland Indians: Slider, Injured in Battle
In 1995 during Game 4 of the NLCS the Cleveland Indians’ mascot Slider fucking fell off a retaining wall while doing a bit during gameplay and got injured and nobody saw him and they just kept playing.
Every single day I wake up and think about this interview that Slider did with a sports blog 20 years after it happened.
I’m begging you to listen to this audio. The disaffected nature with which the announcers discuss the fact that Slider’s entire shit has just been broken truly haunts me. But on a positive note: Slider later married the brunette lady who is seen rushing to his aid in the video! Truly how could you not be attracted on the deepest level to a man you just saw eat full shit in a gigantic pink mascot costume? It was only a matter of time.
Boston Red Sox: The Green Monster
I have nothing to say about the Sox’ Green Monster except for:
- It is unhinged that he is named after the concept of a wall
- the following image can truly only be taken as a threat.
Crazy Crab: The Joker of Mascots
If we really are living in a simulation then I’m just grateful for whoever wrote the code that made the San Francisco Giants decide to purposefully create a mascot for everyone to hate and abuse.
In 1984 the Giants, who had never had a mascot before, came up with the idea for an “anti-mascot” that would essentially poke fun at how dumb the idea of having a mascot was.
Giants attendees were encouraged to hurl insults at the mascot and they took to the idea with a level of cold, merciless devotion that I both fear and respect. Almost immediately Giants fans picked up the habit of pelting The Crab with garbage, beer bottles, and old batteries in such high quantities and with such unrelenting force that the Giants had to augment the Crab outfit with reinforced fiberglass shielding.
The Crazy Crab only served as mascot for one year before scuttling back from whence he came, returning only one more time for a game in 2018 to give away promotional scarves and terrorize citizens.
There is something about Crazy Crab that calls to the most primal parts of my id. He wants you to hate him. He needs you to hate him. He thrives on it. One time I used the word “dongle” so many times in a conversation with my friend Jane that she said “you beg me to block you daily.” This is the part of me that hears Crazy Crab’s call.
In 2015 Colin Hanks felt compelled to direct a 30 for 30 about Crazy Crab that feels, genuinely, like something that would be playing in the background of an episode of Arrested Development.