Why the Yankees’ first and only mascot was cursed
Why the Bronx Bombers buried the memory of their cursed mascot
ON July 22, 1979, a furry pinstriped fellow with a big belly, spinning baseball hat and giant ginger mustache strode out into Yankee Stadium. Dandy, the Yankees’ first and only mascot, had made his world debut. Inside the costume was Rick Ford, a 22-year-old Ithaca College grad from Greenwich, Conn., who had been practicing for his big moment for months, ready to wow the crowd and do for the East Coast what the San Diego Chicken had done for the West. It didn’t go exactly as planned. “They originally wanted me taken out on the field in a truck and then I’d pop out of the roof,” remembers Ford, now 62. “[Team organist] Eddie Layton had composed a song just for Dandy. It was going to be great.”
Instead, Ford emerged from the stadium’s weight room and was led by a p.r. person directly to the stadium’s upper deck.
“I never got an introduction,” Ford said. “Nobody had any idea what I was or what I was doing there. They just looked at me like, ‘What the hell is this thing?’ ”
Dandy’s inauspicious beginning led to a short-lived tenure that the Yankees have seemingly tried to scrub from the record books. A 1998 story on baseball mascots from The New York Times was unable to find any Yankee representatives willing to acknowledge that Dandy ever existed. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner insisted he had “no recollection” of Dandy.
Even the Times’ own reporting couldn’t verify much, guessing (incorrectly) that Dandy roamed Yankee Stadium somewhere between 1982 and 1985. His life span was actually between 1979 and 1981.
Yankees team spokesman Michael Margolis declined to comment on Dandy for The Post, saying only that “there’s just no one left from that era that could speak to that experience.”
Designer Bonnie Erickson, who co-created Dandy — along with the far more successful baseball mascot the Phillie Phanatic — isn’t surprised the Bronx Bombers want to erase their failed experiment.
“They always struck me as a team that’s very proud of their legacy,” she said. “Why would they want to admit that they tried something that didn’t work?”
THE exact origins of Dandy are still unclear.
AJ Mass, author of “Yes, It’s Hot in Here: Adventures in the Weird, Woolly World of Sports Mascots,” suspects that the huge success of the Phillie Phanatic, who debuted in 1978, fueled Steinbrenner’s decision. “George probably didn’t like the idea of Philadelphia one-upping him,” he said.
At the time, Erickson and her partner, Wayde Harrison, had a puppet-design workshop on Fifth Avenue and 17th Street and say they were approached by Yankees executives to create a mascot.
The pair’s track record inspired
confidence. Erickson worked with Jim Henson on shows like “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” designing classic characters like Miss Piggy and the elderly hecklers Statler and Waldorf.
“[The Yankees] didn’t really give us any information about what they wanted,” Erickson said. “We knew they were interested in increasing family attendance, and they thought this was the way to do it. They left the design up to me.”
The designers met with Steinbrenner only once, in his office to review their sketches. It nearly ended in disaster when the notoriously prickly owner took issue with the shade of blue on Dandy’s outfit.
“I did a design that I called a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee,” said Erickson. “The pinstripes were more of a royal blue. Steinbrenner wanted it to be Yankee blue, and we knocked heads about that.”
Although the executives standing in the background were horrified that anyone would be so combative with The Boss, Erickson soon convinced Steinbrenner that royal blue would read better on muppet fur. The Yankees agreed to rent the costume for $30,000 for a three-year trial run.
Ford was still an acting student in college when his uncle introduced him to Erickson, who asked if he’d be interested in playing Dandy. He eagerly came to her workshop to don the costume and “dance to some music and tumble around to show what I could do with it.”
His final tryout (with Steinbrenner watching from the stands) was on a non-game day in Yankee Stadium in June 1979. Ford remembers that two players, Reggie Jackson and Goose Gossage, were also on the field — and they both burst into laughter when they first set eyes on him.
“Gossage turned to Jackson and says, ‘Boy, wait till Thurman gets a load of this guy. He looks just like him,’ ” Ford remembers.
Dandy did slightly resemble Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, or at least his mutual style of facial hair.
But Erickson insists Munson wasn’t the inspiration behind Dandy. “I didn’t even know who he was,” she said of the team’s thencaptain. “I looked at old photos of the team from the early 1900s, and many of the players in those days had big, bushy mustaches,” she said.
But nobody looked at Dandy and saw a loving historical homage. They saw Munson. It was the first bad omen of what was to come.
JUST weeks before Dandy’s world premiere, during an early July 1979 game in Seattle, Yankees outfielder Lou Piniella became enraged by the San Diego Chicken, whowas pretending to put a hex onthe pitcher’s ball. Hegot so upset that he threw his mitt at the Chicken and told reporters later that the mascot “doesn’t belong on the field. Let himdohis routine somewhere else. Don’t let him clown around out there where the players are trying to make a living. It’s distracting.” Steinbrenner publicly echoed Piniella’s remarks later, essentially demanding that mascots be banned from professional baseball. “It was all over the news,” said Harrison. “That’s not what we wanted to see as we were getting ready to unveil our own mascot. We were like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re screwed!’ ” Ford still got the job as Dandy and his debut was set for a matchup with the
Why would they want to admit that they tried something g that didn’t work? — Dandy co-creator Bonnie Erickson