A Guide to Recognizing Your Mascots – Appalachian League

In case you're wondering (and I'm sure you aren't), yes, that's me in the photo with Blooper. Hey, I mentioned that I love and take pictures with these guys, so I was bound to make an appearance sooner or later. Wait until we get to some of the Maryland teams, I'm all over that. I was born in Danville, Virginia, and my Grandfather does some public relations stuff at their park. Yes, I moved away from Danville as soon as I realized art and fun and learning were things. No, I can't seem to properly grow a beard.

Blooper is... I'm gonna say a duck? An urban duck, because he has a baggy jersey and wears his hat to the side. He earned my undying love by spending at least an inning and a half literally lying on the dugout with his arms behind his head doing absolutely nothing. He also didn't realize that when he's sitting under the bleachers with his helmet off, people can see him. He also doesn't realize that the chicken dance is not fun to do and demeans us all.

Fun Fact: Danville briefly had a Carolina League team named the "Danville 97s," and their mascot was Alkaline Trio.

Dingbat, seen here without his Mighty Mutanimals partner Screwloose, is one of two things: a Yip Yip Alien from Sesame Street who was killed after falling from a great height onto a pile of sports equipment, or an Orthodox Jew who has drowned. Either way, the lifeless tongue hanging out of his mouth suggests death, the only imaginable refuge for people living in Bristol, Tennessee. The only things people can do for fun in Bristol are watch NASCAR, have premarital sex with a fat person, or die. Given the options?

Very little information exists about Dingbat online, to the point that I had to raid the Minor League Baseball "road trip" websites to find one. I guess I can't blame them for choosing "blue guy with bat jammed into face" as a mascot when you're the "White Sox." I know we just accept some of these team names because of history, but could you imagine the backlash if Bud Selig announced an expansion team in like, San Antonio and they were called the San Antonio Blue Pants, because they all wear blue pants? And it isn't even Socks, it's Sox. The San Antonio Blue Pantz. Would it make you feel better if I told you they'd be around a hundred years?

Bonus joke: Archie Bunker had sex with this mascot.

Sometimes these jokes write themselves. If I asked you what sort of creature the mascot for the Princeton Rays would be, what would you say? You'd either say a manta ray, which last time I checked was still a functional animal, or some sort of vague furry nothing, right? A prince? A guy named Ray? Now what would you say if I asked you what the producers of Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue would choose if they were in charge of mascotting a baseball team. Give up? They would pick a rooster, but make sure to note that he is a rooster who WOULD NEVER USE DRUGS.

Does that differentiate him from the numerous roosters we interact with daily who casually use drugs? I'm not a cockfighting farmer, but I'm pretty sure you can't grow a six-foot man-rooster without pumping him full of steroids. At this point in my life I think everyone in professional sports is on steroids. The last time a six-foot cock to brag about how he wasn't on drugs was Rafael Palmeiro, and look how that turned out.

I'm not an advocate of cockfighting, but I would pay hard money to see Roscoe cockfight Foghorn Leghorn on pay-per-view. I was going to make a joke about how I never saw Foghorn Leghorn using drugs, but he's pretty clearly using a ton of meth. Come on, he's big, naked, racist and from the South. All he needs is a Hatebreed CD and he's half the people who went to my high school.

I'm not going to make fun of Jay Cee, because he's perfect. The team is the Cardinals, he's a Cardinal. The Cardinals play in Johnson City, so he's "J.C." And I applaud them for putting more work into him than his big league equivalent, Fredbird, who looks like he was put together with construction paper by a fifth grader about three minutes before his debut. His name also reminds us of Jesus Christ, whose father so loved the world that he let us evolve to the point of needing guys in animal costumes super-soakering us in the eye with a hot dog to enjoy our national pastime.

The only downside of Jay Cee is that it looks like he broke his neck trying to get out on the field, and might be a cardinal-themed version of that crappy hay-stuffed-into-my-old-clothes pissant scarecrow I break out every Halloween. And hey, while you're looking at the picture, check out that guy in the background in the far right, dressed like Rog from f**king What's Happening, reclining back with absolutely no idea we're a yawn and a closeup away from full on scrote.

Thank goodness Rookie is the mascot of the Elizabethton Twins. If he was the mascot for the Nationals, they would've brought him up two weeks into the season and made him high-five fans until he ripped his elbow to shreds. Then we would've had to hear Terence Moore's stupid opinion about it.

"The Nationals thought Rookie would make them contenders.

Uh uh.

I don't think so.

It turns out they were wrong."

And then he just keeps hitting enter until the article publishes itself. Anyway, Rookie looks like one of the characters from B.C. had sex with a radioactive llama, and he loves helping kids learn to read. He also doesn't have a picture wider than 300 pixels on the Internet. I e-mailed the Twins, but the only e-mail address they had was to the city of Elizabethton, and I have to imagine that everyone in that city is busy having mixtape road trips and tap dancing at funerals to wonder about my mascot series.

I hate that the series has already come to this, but the people who made this guy should be ashamed of themselves. Here is their entire creative meeting: "Make him a thing, and call him baseball."