Smells like team spirit

My mascot can beat up your mascot, bourgeois pig

Antifa Appropriates a Creepy Mascot
Keep your Marxist hands off Gritty. He belongs to Philly...

…Gritty has inevitably become politicized. Two days after the mascot’s debut, the socialist magazine Jacobin tweeted that “Gritty is a worker.” The same leftists who want statues of Thomas Jefferson removed are now petitioning for Gritty to replace Mayor Frank Rizzo on a downtown mural.

And when President Trump visited Philadelphia last Tuesday, antifa and other far-left groups showed up to protest. Many carried Gritty posters and chanted "Gritty hates Trump"...

-- Jillian Kay Melchior, The Wall Street Journal

September 3, 2019: Last night the Mariners beat the Yankees 7-6 in ten innings, but the bigger story at Safeco Field was the long-awaited meeting between Crusty, Seattle's radical leftist mascot, and Ollie the Oligarch, the capitalist foul-line friend of the Yanks. The normally half-full park was jammed, not only, or even primarily, with baseball fans, but also with rowdy civilians who might not know a triple play from a Texas Leaguer, but knew whose ass they wanted to see kicked.

"I hate the bleeping Yankees," said Todd Zwillich, a former resident of Bellmore, L.I. ("23 miserable years") who drove up for the game from Olympia, where he works as a general contractor. "I hate Dellin Betances and I hate Aaron Judge," Zwillich told this reporter. "I hate Babe Ruth and Joe bleeping DiMaggio and I'm not even sorry Lou Gehrig got so sick they had to name what he got after him. But there is nobody and nothing on this earth that I hate worse than that fat motherbleeper Ollie and I hope he gets his bleeping brains beat in."

Jaime Duerde, the Colombian-American under the foam-rubber and fabric Ollie suit, is decidedly rotund and light on his feet, like Oliver Hardy from the comic duo Laurel and Hardy. But unlike the courtly Depression-era comedian, this Ollie is outfitted like a photo-negative version of Mr. Monopoly from the famous board game in a white top hat and spats -- of course his white suit is pin-striped -- and he gets most of his laughs by telling Yankees fans, in pantomime, how rich he is, and how he looks down on poor people.

During games at Yankee Stadium Ollie will strut bumptiously along the sidelines with his thumbs in his lapels and loftily make the traditional make-some-noise gestures. He also drinks from oversize martini glasses and funnels food into his mouth from an oversize pastry bag marked FOIE GRAS.

But sometimes Ollie will stroll the sidelines throwing fake thousand-dollar bills into the stands until, coming across an attendee he considers underdressed for the occasion, he raises his chin and grips his nose in the universal you-stink sign, then runs to the dugout to grab oversized oblong props marked FOOD STAMPS and throw them at his victims.

One of Ollie's most popular set pieces involves the aid of two hoses, one hooked up to a giant champagne bottle he carries, the other to his pants; on hot days Ollie sprays grateful patrons of whom he approves with water shot through the champagne bottle, but when he encounters patrons of whom he disapproves, he turns around, raises his hindquarters, and emits a gale-force wind at them through a flap in his trousers.

When Yankees chairman Hal Steinbrenner, whose eccentric behavior in recent years is attributed by some to early Alzheimer's Disease, first demanded that his cocktail-napkin sketches of Ollie be translated into an actual mascot, many observers were disturbed, even disgusted; but Ollie became a hit, not only among Yankee fans, but also among the hip-hop community, where his ostentatious celebration of wealth struck a chord, and among well-off suburbanites who came to the Bronx as much to celebrate what New York Republican Congressman Peter King called "old-fashioned Republican values," and maybe engage a prostitute, as to watch the game.

Not all New Yorkers approve of Ollie -- in fact, newspaper polls consistently show him to be among the most hated citizens of the five boroughs, and it has become a rite of passage among liberal college students to come to the games solely to throw batteries at him (which Deadspin has applauded as "a retro return to a tougher old-school baseball experience").

"I don't mind too much," says Duerde with a shrug. "The suit, it keep the battery from hurt me." As to accusations that the "poor" fans he abuses are almost always people of color, Duerde replied, "Look, I got to make a living."

The Mariners' Crusty is a stark contrast to Ollie. Enacted by former party clown/ schoolteacher/ Satanic priest Eldritch McIlhenny, Crusty dresses entirely in black, from his Doc Martens to his balaclava, and celebrates the poor, downtrodden, and Marxist: He begins every game by kneeling for the National Anthem, after which he marches defiantly along the sidelines holding up signs marked with slogans like BLACK LIVES MATTER, REMEMBER REMEMBER THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER, and GIVE IRELAND BACK TO THE IRISH.

Like Ollie, Crusty has become a hit and, like any true leftist hero, his actions have necessitated concessions on the part of his employers. For example, whenever the scoreboard and announcers mention corporate sponsors, Crusty sprints around the stadium with both arms raised, giving the finger; because Crusty gets a huge cheer whenever he does this, and some of the sponsors have suffered boycotts in his name, the team has had to cut its advertising rates. Also, Crusty occasionally gets into fistfights with the fans in premium seats, which has necessitated some extra lines of fine print on their tickets.

When it was announced a few weeks ago that Ollie would accompany the Yankees to yesterday's game, Crusty began dragging an Ollie-like mannequin onto the top of the opposing dugout and beating it viciously with one of the Mariners' bats. He also introduced fans to a communal gesture called the "Guillotine Chop," which has become a craze at as Mariners games as well as at coffee bars and Democratic Socialists of America meetings: It constitutes a sudden drop of the forearm on the one and the three while the crowd sings "La Marseillaise." In response, Duerde sent his wife and children to Colombia for the week, “where at least,” he says, “I know they’ll be safe.”

On game day things started slowly, with the two mascots eyeing one another warily across the field as Seattle hurler James Paxton warmed up. At gametime, the mascots started out with their usual hijinks, with the out-of-towner Ollie getting decent fan support from an influx of Republicans bussed in by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; but as the game wore on, both performers upped the ante, amplifying their obscene and/or contemptuous gestures until several fans in the better seats could be seen on their iPhones, presumably calling the police. Finally Joe Lieberman, announced as a special guest, came onto the field as an honorary umpire to "eject" the two mascots on grounds — the announcer told the crowd — of “bothsides,” to a thunderous torrent of boos, through which Lieberman smiled and waved like the trouper he is, nimbly sidestepping thrown batteries. The crowd settled down as the game got close and cheered when shortstop Jean Segura won it with a two-out home run, but afterwards there were multiple fights in the parking lot resulting in 19 arrests.

Mariners executives promise to increase security for the September 30 game when the Texas Rangers come to town with their mascot, Cracker.