When Mascots Attack

So last week the Tennessee Titans mascot, T-Rac, hit New Orleans Saints quarterback Adrian McPherson with a golf cart. There are a few things that come to mind when I think of that. Firstly, and not to sound too much like Jerry Seinfeld, what is the deal with team mascots? The second, is, what the holy hell is a T-Rac?

That’s the thing with most team mascots. You can’t really tell what the hell they are. They are just college students in very hot and very fuzzy-looking costumes. The only mascot that ever did anything that made them sort of famous was the San Diego Chicken.

When I was a kid the White Sox had two mascots. I still, to this day, have no idea what they were. One was called Ribbie and one was Rhubarb. I remember one of them being very purple. Now, Ribbie, I can sort of understand from a baseball perspective. A lot of baseball fans call Runs Batted In (RBI) Ribbies. But I could never understand what a very hard-to-kill vegetable that some people use to make pies had to do with baseball.

Thankfully, at some point, the Sox got rid of these mascots. That is, until a couple of seasons ago, when someone decided that they needed a mascot again. So, they came up with something called Southpaw. Now, when I first saw a drawing of Southpaw it looked sort of like a dinosaur. It’s sort of green and the drawing made it look like a lizard wearing a baseball uniform. No dinosaur would ever be caught dead in a baseball uniform but at least I could understand the appeal of dinosaurs to kids. Then I saw the actual mascot and it was a fuzzy green thing and I am just not aware of any fuzzy green lizards. As such, I still have no idea exactly what Southpaw is supposed to be. Do kids actually like him? I know when I went to Soxfest this past year I saw more of Southpaw than any of the players.

Some mascots just don’t make much sense like that. You look at the Cardinals and that does make some kind of sense. It’s a guy in a big cardinal costume and they call him Fredbird. Get it? A cardinal is a redbird and the mascot is a Fredbird. Hard-de-har-har.