Five of the Worst Mascots in MLB History

Mascots are supposed to represent your team, right? They’re the embodiment of everything that makes your city great, and they’re supposed to get the crowd excited and bring them to their feet to he lp rally the team to victory.

Apparently certain mascot planning commissions throughout history didn’t get this memo, or they frequently mixed up words like “excite” and “entertain” with “confuse” and “terrify”. You wish you could have been a fly on the wall while the characters on this list were being cooked up. Because these mascots manage to get every single thing wrong. It’s as if their designers were given a checklist of proper mascot characteristics and instead of using it, they opted to burn it, eat it, and then do the opposite of everything it contained.

Here are five of the worst mascots in Major League Baseball history, presented in no particular order because they’re all equally terrible.

Crazy Crab (San Francisco Giants)

If you were a kid in San Francisco during the 1984 baseball season, you were provided with ample nightmare fuel with the introduction of Crazy Crab. This mascot was a fairly realistic hermit crab with a large, cartoon face inexplicably stuck onto the character’s underbelly. Itsunfixed googly eyes and mild look of a stroke victim didn’t do anything to warm the hearts of Giants fans. It also didn’t help that the team lost 96 games that season.

Crazy Crab was actually designed to be hated, and so it could be argued that it was the most successful mascot ever. It lasted a single season.

Dandy (New York Yankees)

What do you get when you combine a muppet, an eggplant, and Yosemite Sam? No, there’s no punchline. You get Dandy, the strange genetic hybrid that lasted two seasons as the mascot for the New York Yankees.

Not only was he made mascot right as the team took a nose dive after the 1979 season, but also his mustache looked quite a bit like the one worn by team captain Thurman Munson, who died in a plane crash during Dandy’s tenure. Dandy was cut in 1981, and the Yankees haven’t had a costumed mascot since.

Bleacher Creature (Atlanta Braves)

The Braves have an unfortunate history with mascots. Their Chief Noc-A-Homa character was an offensive Native American parody that would spring from his teepee to dance for the crowd whenever the Braves hit a home run.

But preceding the Chief in the 1970s was Bleacher Creature, a fuzzy green furball with matted hair that can best be described as a sentient, unwashed brussel sprout in a baseball cap. If the Banana Splits had featured a moldy pet rock on their show, Bleacher Creature would have been a shoo-in for the role.

Dinger (Colorado Rockies)

Dinger, a cherubic, polka-dotted purple stegosaurus was literally hatched from a dinosaur egg on the field back in 1994 and has since been the focus of quite a bit of mascot hate, for good reason. Dinger looks like he was made to host a children's show, but was beat out for the lead role by another famous purple dinosaur who shall go unnamed.

If you were a kid in the late ‘90s you may still harbor a love for Dinger, but that love was created while you still thought the Wiggles was good music, sprinklers were satisfactory stand-ins for swimming pools, and farts were the highest form of humor. That doesn’t say much for Dinger.

Charlie-O (Kansas City/Oakland Athletics)

This last mascot makes the list because of the sheer laziness it represents on the part of the team’s owner and the fans that let Charlie-O represent them for 13 years, from 1963 to 1976. There were no poor design choices here because no design was required. Charlie-O fails as a mascot because he wasn’t a mascot. He was a mule. That’s it. The Athletics’s claim to mascot fame for 13 years was the infertile offspring of a horse and a donkey. It didn’t do any special tricks other than carrying players on its back and occasionally pooping on the field.

We said these five mascots were equally terrible, but that’s not true. Charlie-O pulls ahead of the pack as the worst MLB mascot ever. Congratulations, Charlie-O...you win?