LOS ANGELES – When the New York Yankees lost a playoff game last week, a fuzzy, pink blob with yellow spots raced into the outfield, waving a flag in celebration. This was a few innings after hot dog races around the warning track, and a few hundred miles from the scene in the other league, where the Los Angeles Dodgers endured the antics of a married duo with giant baseball heads, cheered by fans in purple Grimace costumes.
Playtime’s over now. No more shenanigans, no more tomfoolery, no more ballyhoo. The Yankees brushed past the silly Cleveland Guardians in their league championship series, and the Dodgers dumped the dopey New York Mets in theirs.
The World Series is here.
No mascots allowed.
“The NY logo, the LA logo, they’re clean, they’re crisp, everybody knows what they are and who they stand for,” said Charley Steiner, who has served as the radio voice of both teams. “To have some dopey little guy in some costume? I don’t know. Just go play. These two franchises have been so enormously successful for so many years, do they really need a mascot to enhance their brand?”
At Dodger Stadium and Yankee Stadium, it’s a rhetorical question. Twenty-eight teams have mascots, if you include the Angels’ Rally Monkey, who doesn’t roam the stands (probably for the best) but is used in team promotions. The exceptions are the last teams standing in 2024.
And that’s the way they like it.
“Very simple,” Yankees President Randy Levine said. “The Yankees brand stands for what it always has. It stands for excellence, it stands for greatness, and we don’t need a mascot to basically explain what our brand is.
“We do marketing as good as anyone, we do outreach as good as anyone, we treat our fans as good as anyone. But the brand is what the brand is. That’s why our uniforms basically haven’t changed: it’s the pinstripes, the NY and the top hat. Everyone knows what we’re about, all over the world. We don’t need mascots to sell it.”
Levine’s counterpart with the Dodgers, Stan Kasten, was previously the president of the Washington Nationals. That team has a fluffy eagle named Screech as a mascot, plus a Mount Rushmore of Presidents who race every game.
The culture of the Dodgers is just a bit different.
“It’s the same reason we don’t change our uniform, ever, with the exception of the City Connect thing,” Kasten said. “It’s just honoring and respecting the tradition that our fans have always had. There are things we update, certainly, but there just are a few things that we think kind of speak to (our) identity, and not having an identifiable mascot is one of them.”
The Dodgers and Yankees have led their leagues in attendance in each of the last five seasons with full-capacity crowds, so there’s not much incentive to change.
“They’re very cognizant of their image, and who wouldn’t be?” said Steve Sax, an All-Star second baseman for both teams. “You’d want to keep that image like it is. The Yankees are so traditional – no facial hair, no name on the back of the uniform – and the Dodgers were the same way with the O’Malley ownership back then: ‘We’re not having a mascot, this isn’t college.’
“Now, when I was at Double A with the Dodgers in San Antonio, they had dancing girls on the dugout – I know because one of them was my girlfriend. They were called the Dodger Dollies, and they were just dancing away between innings. But I don’t think the Dodgers would have a mascot. I could never see that happening.”
It’s notable that Sax would make an exception for the Yankees and Dodgers, because he’s all in favor of ballpark fun – in the right setting, anyway. In the 1980s, when the Dodgers played on the road in Philadelphia, Sax would swipe Tommy Lasorda’s extra uniform and give it to Dave Raymond, the original Phillie Phanatic. Raymond’s act was so funny – and Lasorda hated it so much – that Sax was happy to be a co-conspirator.
In this case, though, Raymond disagrees with his old partner in crime. To Raymond, who essentially created the template for all team-specific mascots to follow, the Yankees and Dodgers are missing out.
“It’s easy to say ‘we don’t need it,’” said Raymond, who played the Phanatic from 1978 to 1993 and has since helped other teams build their own characters.
“Meanwhile, you’re losing an opportunity to drive amazing revenue by leveraging how great those cities are, and you’re losing the opportunity to build new fans. I don’t care how beautiful the ballpark is and how reverent the memories are and how many championships you have. A four-year-old couldn’t care less about that. They’ll learn about it, but they just want to have fun. Fun is oxygen. Kids can’t survive without it. And when you give that to them, they will forever be emotionally connected to your brand.”
There have always been holdouts. For decades, the Boston Red Sox reveled – or was it wallowed? – in their stodgy image. When they introduced a mascot at ancient Fenway Park, in 1997, fans booed.
The Boston Globe published a letter to the editor from a fan, Paul Duggan, who seemed to capture the spirit: “Not many years from now, when Fenway’s last day arrives and we reflect on its gradual demise, we will mark April 13, 1997, and the debut of ‘Wally the Green Monster’ as the beginning of the end of the ballpark we knew.”
Somehow, Fenway is still standing and Wally’s still around. (He even has a pig-tailed sister named Tessie.) Similarly, the Chicago Cubs welcomed their first mascot, Clark the Cub, in 2014. He doesn’t dance on the dugout at old Wrigley Field, but he’s a valuable brand ambassador at games and around town.
The Dodgers, at least, do a little something for their littlest fans. Though they’re careful not to use the term mascot, the Dodgers have two costumed “bobblehead characters” greeting young fans, mostly at stadium entry points.
“We don’t have one, identifiable image or character with a name,” Kasten said. “They’re there to amuse and entertain, take photos with the kids. That’s, I think, a suitable place for that. And we don’t engage them in our game ops.”
The Yankees made a brief and disastrous foray into the mascot game in 1979 with Dandy, a pinstriped, mustachioed goofball whose disappearance – Chuck Cunningham-like – was never explained or acknowledged.
“I know we had one back in the ’80s, some weird time, but I don’t know how long it lasted,” reliever Tommy Kahnle said. “A funny-looking thing, that’s for sure.”
When the Phanatic instantly won over tough Philly fans in 1978, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner decided he wanted his own version the next year. The team contracted Harrison/Erickson, designers for the Muppets and the Phanatic, and leased the Dandy character for $30,000 for three years.
Before they introduced it, though – well, there was an incident. The San Diego Chicken was heckling Ron Guidry at a game in Seattle, prompting Lou Piniella to fling his glove at the bird and Steinbrenner to cry fowl. (Sorry.)
Instead of a grand rollout, the Yankees confined Dandy to the upper deck when he debuted on July 22, 1979. After catcher Thurman Munson – who also sported a bushy mustache – died in a plane crash in early August, the mascot’s appearances dwindled.
Raymond thinks Dandy could have worked, if only the Yankees had cared more about it and committed to the idea. He has no doubt that both the Yankees and Dodgers could create popular mascots, but it would take a sincere effort that’s not forthcoming.
“It takes a lot of courage to mess with an established brand,” Raymond said. “That’s the reason why it hasn’t been done at those places, because the amount of bricks that have been built up on that wall – and the strength of those bricks – are just hard to break through.
“And you’d have to be smart about it; you’d have to do it right. It isn’t as easy as, ‘Hey, we’re just going to make a costume and get some fool to jump in and run around.’ It has to be done with what we call serious fun. It’s very, very serious work. The output will be silly, but the value changes the world.”
It just won’t change the World Series.
(Top image: Meech Robinson / The Athletic. Photos: Michael Reaves, Alika Jenner, John Fisher / Getty Images)