| FromVAtoLA |
08-27-2025 05:54 PM |
Kids as mascots go back well into the 19th century. Here's an excerpt with some details on the origins - link. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/c...g?format=2500w Mascots have certainly come a long way since the days of Chic, but to understand our modern day cute and cuddly spiritual superstars, we need to know where the word itself came from, as well as recognizing some of the first trailblazers. Originally, the French word mascotte meant lucky charm and was often used as gambling slang, with the hope that a "mascotte" was there to bring luck to the player. The word was finally brought to the mainstream by the 1880 French opera La Mascotte, about an Italian farmer who had a hard time growing crops until he was visited by a mysterious virgin named Bettina, who as long as she remained a virgin, would function as somewhat of a good luck charm. Eventually, the farmer's fortunes turned around. But Lady Luck was to become no lady in the world of modern day sports marketing.
In America, the word evolved into its present day spelling, helped in part by the Sporting Life and The New York Times. In 1886, an issue of Sporting Life referred to a mascot connected to the Boston Browns baseball team, “Little Nick is the luckiest man in the country, and is certainly the Browns' mascott”—the “e” being dropped for the first time. The New York Times followed suit later that year when they lost the extra "t" when referencing a boy named Charlie Gallagher who was "said to have been born with teeth and is guaranteed to possess all the magic charms of a genuine mascot."
As we can see, most of the earliest mascots were either children or animals, and both were associated with good luck. It's not entirely clear who or what was the first human, but Chic is widely considered the most probable, especially considering his link with the first use of the word itself. And as far as the first animal, an 1884 edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer said this in regards to a goat wandering around their baseball team: “The goat was probably looking for some show-bills, oyster-cans, or some other usually palatable dish for his stomach, but the audience could not see it in that light and thought he was an even better mascotte than the old-time favorite." It's entirely possible, however, that the first official animal mascot may have been Handsome Dan, a bulldog that belonged to a member of the Yale class of 1892. Handsome Dan remains Yale's mascot today, 18 versions later.
Thus, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was live humans—mostly children, and animals that would grace our fields, stadiums, and gymnasiums as mascots for their prospective sports teams. It would take several years before our current costumed mascots began making their way into the hearts and minds of the American sports fan, thanks to the popularity of Jim Henson’s Muppets and the idea of somehow humanizing these characters and good luck charms, although some colleges have had different iterations of them dating back nearly a hundred years.
Couldn't find a reference to that Nationals team in 1913 but here's a story about the Giants mascot in 1911/1912 - source
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the term began to be extended to include the mentally and physically disabled as well. With teams such as the Phillies and the Athletics employing hunchback youngsters as batboy mascots.
In 1911, John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants baseball team, met Charlie “Victory” Faust, an intellectually disabled farmhand, while attending a county fair in St. Louis.
Faust predicted that he would pitch the Giants to a pennant, and as a result, was invited to team trials. Despite not having the skills to become a professional ballplayer, the Giants decided to keep Faust around the team as a good luck charm. McGraw, however, failed to disclose this information to Faust, letting him believe that he was a real Giant’s player.
Before games, Faust was an inadvertent clown, earnestly displaying his inept talents on the field. The Giants would even let him pitch during a couple of innings, for there own amusement. The Giants and their opposition failing to inform Faust that both teams had prearranged the gag.
During one game, Faust managed to steal two bases, scored, and then yelled to his laughing teammates “Who’s loony now?”
Part of Faust’s prediction came true, the Giants became the 1911 National League champions. However, they would go on to lose the World Series to the Philadelphia Athletics, whose mascot was a hunchback dwarf named Louis van Zelst.
The following year Faust believed that he was again a key member of the Giants team, insisting that he should play more. McGraw no longer found the ruse funny and started to worry about Faust’s mental state and decided to let him go.
A broken-hearted Faust moved to Seattle to join his brother. Despite being released from the Giants, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the team needed him. So he decided to walk all the way from Seattle to Portland, in an attempt to rejoin the Giants for a game.
He was picked up by police officers along the way and decided to send him to a mental hospital. He was diagnosed with dementia and died a year later at the age of just 34.
Another unnecessary early version of the mascot was L’il Rastus. Who became the personal mascot of Detroit Tigers’ player Ty Cobb.
Cobb would rub the head of L’il Rastus, a homeless black teenager, before batting, as he believed it produced good luck.
Mascots during the early years were mostly passive, often just standing around being lucky. That changed in 1944, at an exhibition game, in Hawaii, when Joe DiMaggio hit a massive home run off of a pitcher named Max Patkin.
Patkin cracked and ran off the mound, chasing DiMaggio as he rounded the bases. Mimicking his home run trot. The crowd loved it.
After World War II, Patkin retired from pitching and was signed by the Cleveland Indians to draw in and entertain crowds. Fifty years of wacky antics lead to Patkin being dubbed “The Clown Prince of Baseball.”
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