In what may be the biggest mascot news scoop of our time, at least since the New York Times last wrote about it in 1998, the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Cacciola cracked open the vaults of failure this morning, and out crawled Yankee Dandy.
From 1979 to 1981, the Yankees employed a mascot named Dandy. He was big and blue and a spectacular failure”a historical oddity for a proud franchise that has collected 27 world championships but would just as soon forget he even existed.
The mascot, brainchild and surrogate child of mascot designers Bonnie Erickson and Wayde Harrison, also parents to the Phillie Phanatic (presumably by another biological father), suffered a quick demise as fallout from a Lou Piniella-San Diego Chicken mitt-tossing skirmish that would lead the Yankees organization to declare mascots out of bounds for good.
Following the digg and retweet popularity of today’s piece on Yankee Dandy, follow-up articles on similarly defunct MLB mascots like the Cubs Fop and the Los Angeles Fancy-Man are planned by the WSJ for later this week.