Daily Archives: June 2, 2008

Have the Yankees ever had a mascot?

Yesterday, I would have answered this question with a quick and confident “no.” But I would have been wrong.

In the early 80s, the Yankees hired the creators of the popular Phillie Phanatic. They were rewarded with “Dandy,” a fuzzy debacle that is apparently supposed to resemble some sort of bird — though looking at the little photographic evidence available, I can’t confirm that with any certainty. Dandy was an elongated white blob adorned with pinstripes, a Yankees cap, a flesh-colored ball for a nose, and a swath of bright material that is either meant to represent a big red mustache or, perhaps, wattle.

Fans reacted to this misbegotten Frankenstein the way you’d expect: with a potent mixture of fear and hostility. In the end the Yankees never let Dandy onto the field, into the dugout, or even out of the Stadium; instead he was limited to roaming the upper deck, where he was routinely heckled, harassed, and threatened.

How on earth did I not know about this? All the games I’ve watched, books I’ve read, fans I’ve talked to, and I never heard a word about it? I suppose it makes sense, really – I was too young to pay attention at the time, and nobody writes books or articles on the New York Yankees of 1982-1985. Those games never end up on YES as “Yankee Classics”. Besides, a little research reveals that most fans who lived through the Dandy era seem to have tried their best to forget. My father’s reaction was typical:

“Mascot? The Yankees never had a… ohhhhh, yeah, that’s right! God, people hated that thing.”

I felt a little better about my ignorance when I discovered that, back in 1998, not even Lonn Trost or George Steinbrenner remembered Dandy. The New York Times had the scoop:

Lonn Trost, the Yankees’ general counsel, said there are official Yankee hamburgers, hot dogs and popcorn. But a mascot? No, he didn’t think the team ever had one.

From 1982 to 1985, though, the Yankees had Dandy, a pinstriped character designed by Ms. Erickson.

Dandy was a failure. Mr. Harrison said that was because he wasn’t allowed out of the nosebleed area in the stands. Nor did he do any outside appearances. According to Mr. Harrison, George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner, was less than enthusiastic about the mascot after Lou Pinella, the Yankee outfielder, got so angry at the San Diego Chicken’s clowning that he threw his glove at the bird (not a Harrison/ Erickson creation). Mr. Steinbrenner, through his spokesman Howard Rubenstein, said he had no recollection of the pinstriped mascot.

One of my neighbors, a fan since the 1960s, told me that in his recollection, Dandy lasted only a few weeks before he was beaten up by a group of angry or, perhaps, simply terrified nosebleed seat natives, after which the traumatized man in the suit resigned and was never replaced. I feel a little bad for finding this story hilarious, but in any case he seems to have exaggerated it a bit over the decades — by the Times’ account, Dandy hung in there for years, and I haven’t been able to track down any hard evidence that he was ever actually physically assaulted. Even if it isn’t strictly true, I like this outsized distillation of events, which seems to capture the popular imagination’s image of the lawless Yankee Stadium of the 80s.

In this summer of endless nostalgia, everyone goes on and on about how the Yankees will be tearing down the field where Ruth and Gehrig played, the site of 26 World Championships, blah blah blah… but do they ever mention that after this year, the home of Dandy will be gone, too? They do not. I say that poor bird(???) deserves better.

Anybody have any memories of Dandy that you’d like to share?

The Yankee offense gave Andy Pettite three leads last night and Pettitte blew every one of them, the last on Joe Mauer’s first home run of the season on a pitch that a irritated Pettitte later called “as ignorant a pitch as I could throw.” Brought into a 5-5 game in the eighth inning, Kyle Farnsworth gave the Twins their first lead of the game by surrendering doubles to two of the first three hitters he faced. Joe Nathan came on in the ninth to protect that last-minute lead and handed the Yankees a 6-5 loss.

Fooey.

If there was any good news to come out of the game it was that Farnsworth’s fateful inning was the only one pitched by the bullpen as Pettitte pitched efficiently, needing just 94 pitches to complete seven frames. That sets things up well for Joba Chamberlain’s 70-pitch start tonight. Still, the Yankees are coming home a game under .500 and just a half game out of last place in the East having gone 3-4 on their trip through Baltimore and Minnesota.

With the Yankees bobbing around in last place in the AL East, I haven’t spent much time looking at the standings thus far this year, but checking things out this morning, I see that a four-game losing streak has dropped the Orioles 2 1/2 games behind the Bombers, who are back at .500 and 6 1/2 games out of first place. They’re only 1 1/2 games behind the Blue Jays, however, and Toronto comes to the Bronx tomorrow for a three game series. That means a good week could bounce the Yankees up to third place with only the Rays and Red Sox, the teams with the two best records in the American League, and two of the three best records in baseball, ahead of them.

The Yankees can kick this week off right with a get-away win in Minneapolis tonight. Beating the Twins tonight would give the Yankees a series win (rather than the four-game split that would result from a loss), push them over .500, and give them the same record as the Twins, who are only a game out of first place in the Central entering tonight’s game.

Andy Pettitte will look to pitch the Yankees to that victory. Pettitte is coming off three straight quality starts in which he’s allowed a total of one home run and walked just three men while striking out 19 in 18 2/3 innings. He’ll face Livan Hernandez, who has a 6.08 ERA in four career starts against the Yankees. Of course, three of those starts came between 1997 and 2002, which is ancient history by now, but the most recent was last June and saw the Yankees tag Hernandez for seven runs in four innings including home runs by Alex Rodriguez, Hideki Matsui, and Jorge Posada.

Hernandez has an 8.74 ERA in his last two starts, and was most recently slapped around by the lowly Kansas City Royals. Despite giving up all those runs, he’s not allowed a home run in his last 23 2/3 innings, but then he’s only struck out three men over the same span (while walking only two). Hernandez’s single-game high for strikeouts this year is four, and it took him seven innings to do that, and he’s only walked three men in a game once all year. So one things for sure, the Yankees will be putting the ball in play tonight.

My cousin Jonah is an avid Met fan. He and his wife live in Brooklyn and they are great movie-lovers too. But they do not have cable TV, so Jonah listens to virtually every game on a small, old-fashioned transistor radio. When he’s out and about, he has a small, white earphone plugged into one ear to keep up on the action. When I’ve asked why he doesn’t just get cable like every other “normal” person he says that he doesn’t like the idea of being held captive in front of the television. The thought of it is oppresive to him, even in the age of Tivo.

He can do as he pleases and take the radio with him. I admire him for this quality. I can’t imagine doing such a thing, not with Lord Sterling as the Yankee play-by-play announcer–that would be too much to bear. Still, baseball on the radio can be a wonderful experience for the listener and many of my favorite childhood baseball memories are made up of evenings secretly listening to the Yankee broadcast while I was supposed to be asleep.

I got to thinking about all of this when I read a short essay, “Recalling the Joy of Watching Baseball on the Radio,” which is featured in the collection Diamond: The Baseball Writings of Mark Harris. Most famous for his Henry Wiggens trilogy, Harris doesn’t argue that radio is superior to television, just that they each offer distinct pleasures:

Radio left things to the brain, to the imagination, and to fantasy. On radio we saw the whole baseball field because we saw it in our minds through wide-agnled fantasy. We knew no limits upon our vision. We were our own camera. Pictures arose in our imaginations from the merest hints of things. Our minds were tubes that seldom blew.

This is not to say that radio was better than television, or that one age of mankind was better than another. But that radio was significantly different from televsion, and not always less efficient, cannot be denied. Radio was awe. The awe produced by remoteness…Television reduces awe.

The last bit reminded me of Nicholas Dawidoff’s new memoir, The Crowd Sounds Happy. In it, Dawidoff describes following the Red Sox of his childhood on the radio. Just yesterday, Dawidoff had a compelling piece in the latest edition of Play:

Recently I turned 45, which I think of as a mortal age for a baseball fan; by now, with the rarest exceptions, you are older than every major leaguer. What I notice at midlife is that the passion doesn’t abate; it simply changes. Thinking of the Red Sox as heroes was an innocent fantasy and, for that reason, a seductive one, but adulthood meant finally coming to terms with ballplayers as real people. That wasn’t so difficult in our time of heightened public scrutiny. We wanted to know them, and now we know them too well. Much of it is the money, the millions they earn while most of us are struggling with the rent. Our pastime is a big, mercenary business, and we’ve learned that players will deform themselves with steroids, cheating mortality and their opponents in an effort to stay forever young and powerful. Those of us who are offended by steroids may feel that what’s most unpleasant is that we can’t look at a juiced physique and still think, That could be me.

Athletes are often amazingly unformed as people, and much as I retain the naïve, nostalgic longing for them to be good in all ways, when they aren’t it helps to exercise a little circumspection. I can do that, because the older I get, the more I see that the fun of it is not the results but the process. What’s magical now about baseball is the continuity of having these splendid performers there for me month after month, year after year. I didn’t savor the Red Sox’ long-awaited World Series victory as much as I enjoyed the growing possibility that they could win. These days, I try not to know too much about the players. I want to care — and by being more distanced, I find I still feel close to them.

I recall having a conversation a few years ago with a couple of Baseball Prospectus writers. They wanted to know as little as possible about big leaguers, at least about their personal lives, because they didn’t want that to get in the way of what they were watching on the field. I can appreciate that. Having worked in the movie business, and to a lesser degree, in the world of sports, I understand what it is like to be meet a favorite actor or director only to find that they are lacking (or worse). I think it is critical to separate the artist (or the athlete) from their art. At the same time, I have a curiosity bordering on desire to not only want to know more about my favorite jocks and artists but also a childlike need to like them, to know that they are good people. As if their personality has anything to do with their gift.