The Guide to Recognizing Your Mascots tour of baseball’s minor leagues returns this week with the California League. I’m sorry it took me so long to finish this, I wanted to just write it, but everyone thinks I’ve got mental problems, so I had to stuff my lunchbox full of pictures of the Bakersfield Blaze and High Desert Mavericks and hitchhike to the West Coast myself. I had some troubles along the way (such as a hot shot blogger named Lucas who has already written about all of these mascots), but a helpful group of bikers took me most of the way. It saved me a lot of time, but I don’t ever want to hear “Send Me An Angel” again.

Anyway, enough of my literary wizardry. If this is your introduction to the series, be sure to click the A Guide to Recognizing Your Mascots tag and read through the leagues we’ve already covered. This one will be just like those, except all the giant Muppet things have temperature names. Sh:t, I just ruined the entire article. Sorry, my only joke is about how the baseball llama’s name is “Sunny.”

Click through, enjoy the hilarity, and drop a comment. Don’t make me get all emotional in a big dinosaur.

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For the discerning Minor League Baseball fan, the South Atlantic League is clearly the league of choice. You can quote me on that. Who cares if it is the only Low A league in that region? Who cares if their logo looks like it came straight from an early 90s PC game? I love the Myrtle Beach Leisure Suit Larries. Maybe Maniac Mansion has a team in the SAL. Who cares that their old logo had Jon Arbuckle on it because they made it with that old Garfield comic strip maker? SAL is the league of choice, even if a league named “SAL” would probably play better in New York.

The A Guide to Recognizing Your Mascots series continues today with the South Atlantic League, culturally appreciated by everyone south of Pennsylvania. I wouldn’t expect you Philadelphia Philistines to enjoy reading about golfing bees and transsexual crawdads.

Before you continue, make sure to catch up with leagues somehow even lower than this via the Guide to Mascots tag. Believe it or not, things are about to get worse. But at least we’ve got a good chance of making it through this league without running into any bears.

An important thing I’ve learned about writing on the Internet is that 98 out of 100 people reading your work live in the U.S. Northeast. That seems like an exaggeration, but nope, it’s all New York, Pennsylvania, D.C., New England. Person 99 lives in Los Angeles and is usually too busy with “life stuff” to read your stuff, and person 100 is my Mom doing Farmville on Facebook. That’s it. When the Internet finally expands to the Midwest, it is going to be pretty cool (read: boring).

With that said, today’s Guide to Recognizing Your Mascots covers the New York-Penn League, a league so white and privileged that Williamsport, Pennsylvania, gets a team. Williamsport is totally the mid-Idaho of Pennsylvania. You’ve got Pittsburgh to your left and Philadelphia to your right (or vice versa, depending on which way you’re standing). Pick a direction and live there. The league is divided into the McNamara Division, the Pinckney Division and the Stedler Division, but I don’t know what any of those words mean so I just glossed over that.

In case you’ve missed the previous installments, please peruse your Pioneer, Appalachian and Northwest Leagues before continuing. When you’re ready, please click through to continue.

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For week three of the Guide To Recognizing series of unsolicited MiLB team mascot information we jump back across the continental United States to the Northwest League of Professional Baseball, a Short-Season A classification minor league. The league is a descendant of the old Western International League, with memorable teams such as the Victoria Athletics, the Lewiston Black Chinese Indians and the Oregon Trail Dysentery Havers. You don’t want to know about their mascot, trust me.

If you’ve read the rundown of the Pioneer and Appalachian Leagues, you won’t need my disclaimer about how I’m a normal person who just happens to think mascots are stupid and fun. But in the interest of filling up these introductory paragraphs, here goes: I am a lecherous creep, but I try to keep that separated from my love of baseball. Think of it like refusing to cheer for a WWE Diva. I love pro wrestling and I love strippers, but I don’t want to have to look at them at the same time, you know?

Please move right along and click through to read about what people in Washington are doing when you aren’t looking.

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Last week, the debut installment of A Guide to Recognizing Your Mascots dealt with the rookie level’s Pioneer League and featured married owls, an alligator passing as a velociraptor and purple platypus cheering for a team called the “Ghosts.” Somehow, almost against its own will, the Pioneer League’s East Coast equivalent, the Appalachian League, makes things worse. Not that you’d get more than an eye roll and an “oh jesus” from people when you say “Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee.” I lived in and grew up in those states, and I do the same thing.

In case you didn’t read part one, here’s what you need to know. I am a sane, adult male of no particular disorder who loves baseball, and by proxy loves the ridiculous nonsense given flesh (or felt passing as flesh) by the world of mascots. I meet them, I take my picture with them, and I have no psychological reason for doing so, other than that time when I was six and had a chance to dance with the Smurfs at Kings Dominion and didn’t and ended up feeling guilty about it for the rest of my life. Shut up.

Please click through and enjoy the Appalachian League, before the league presidents chase you down a river and make you squeal like a plush pig.

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Baseball season is upon us, and only one thing matters.  It’s not how active your team was during the off-season, not how many members of your team will be arrested for DUI before the season begins, and not how prospectively upset you’re going to be at Derek Jeter’s first outfield Gold Glove. No, the only important thing about baseball season is the return of baseball’s stupid, pandering pageantry, and that includes (moreso than anything) the mascots.

I love mascots in the most platonic, nonsexual way ever. It sucks that I have to say that, but there you go. I collect photos with them, and I search the Internet for others who share my passion, but the only people I can find are perverts (obviously) and those wiry forty-somethings in grandpa glasses and baseball caps who travel the country going to games alone and getting photos on what appears to be a Polaroid from 1945. I am alone in my joy. As it turns out, most people don’t know how wonderfully stupid mascots can get.

So this is the first in a series of attempts to change that. Starting with the Pioneer League, which is a rookie-level league wherein guys in coonskin caps shoot rifles at Indians affiliates, I will chronicle who these teams are and the creatures they boast as representatives. Read the rest of this entry »