[CW]

Originally Posted by Rhotchkiss

I have no mascot items, but I always thought they were very interesting - why did a team need a young boy to hang with them? Were mascots the predecessor to bat boys?

Never really thought about the origins of it all, but your question got me curious, Ryan.

With a little research it looks like the main reason initially for team mascots was good luck, as the name mascot comes from the French word mascotte which meant "lucky charm". The ties between baseball and superstitions appear to go back all the way to its roots.

All from here:
https://www.theculturecrush.com/feature/mascots

But it actually all started out in the 1800’s when a little boy named Chic, who carried bats and ran errands for baseball players, became known as the teams good luck charm. According to an 1883 issue of The Sporting Life Magazine, “the players pinned their faith to Chic's luck-bringing qualities” and it was exactly those so-called good luck charm qualities and maybe a little superstition that laid the foundation for what have become the goofy, beloved, and mostly infamous mascots of both pro and amateur sports teams all over modern day America.

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.