The Economics of Everyday Things - 5. Sports Mascots

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

We’re not sure what that creature cavorting on the sidelines is — but it doesn’t come cheap. Zachary Crockett gets the ballpark figures on everyone’s favorite ballpark figures.

When you go to a baseball game, there are a few things you can count on. You'll hear the vendors hollering over the din of the crowd. You'll smell the peanuts, the hot dogs, the ludicrously overpriced beers. And if you're at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, you'll see a 6.5-foot tall, fuzzy, green beast waddling across the field in search of trouble. Even if you're not a sports fan, you've probably heard of the Philly fanatic. Sports Illustrated called him the best mascot in history. He has sold millions of dollars worth of merchandise,

and he brings families to the ballpark at a time when fewer people are going to baseball games. How exactly does he do that? Well, it has a lot to do with the guy who originally wore the costume. I could throw, I could catch, I could do cartwheels, not a lot of gymnastics, but I could dance, I could move really well. I kind of fancied myself as being the secret weapon. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Kraken. Today, sports mascots. The secret weapon you just heard from, that's Dave Raymond. His story starts back in the late 1970s. As a sophomore in college, he landed a summer internship with the Phillies. I was in the promotion office and my dad had said, look, when you get this job, you do whatever they ask you to do. Don't say no to anything. So I was stocking shelves. I was cleaning bathrooms up in the executive offices.

And then I might be taking the national anthem singer to dinner, but that all changed in the spring of 78. At the time, the Phillies had a problem on their hands. Attendance wasn't too hot. And the promotions department was trying to get more butts in the seats On the other side of the country someone had an intriguing solution Out in California a 20-year-old kid named Ted Ted Gianulis was making waves at San Diego Padres games By dressing up as a chicken and cavorting around the field. The chicken kind of had a raunchy routine

He actually chugged beer through his beak. This chicken character is just out of his mind and people are actually coming to the game Because they're hearing about him. Professional sports mascots were not a new idea. The Phillies even had their own. Philadelphia Phil and Philadelphia Phyllis, a pair of twins in revolutionary war outfits. But they weren't designed to entertain. They were more like walking logos or symbols. The performer would wear these big, heavy body suits made out of some pieces of wood. They had no mobility. The Phillies saw the impact that this chicken was having

in San Diego. And they decided to up their mascot game with a new character. So they went straight to the best people in the business. My name is Bonnie Erickson, and I was the designer of the Philly Phanatic. Erickson had been a part of the original design team for the Muppet Show. Let's just say you've seen her work. The two old men, Statler and Waldorf. I also did George the janitor, probably the most famous is Miss Biggie. She had just started a character design firm with her husband Wade Harrison, and the Phillies wanted some of that Muppet Mojo. The rationale the Phillies gave us was they needed to encourage younger people to become baseball fans.

I'd watched baseball games, but I certainly didn't know that much about the whole process. So one of the first things we did was go down to Philly and ask them about their audience. And what'd you see? Well, we heard a lot about the fans. We heard that they'd booed Santa Claus, so that was pretty daunting. Erickson mocked up some sketches of a curious creature. With a megaphone snout and a pear-shaped body, the fanatic was designed to be on the move. He's a green flightless bird from the Galapagos Islands. He's 300 plus pounds,

depending on what day of the week you weigh him. I wanted something that would be funny if you just watched it walk. Masks are non-speaking characters. They have to transfer everything that they want to say through their body motion. That's why the fanatic has feather eyebrows, feather tail, things that are showing some action. When Ericsson sold the character to the Phillies, she gave them a choice. They could buy the costume and the copyright to the character for 5200 bucks, or they could just buy the costume for 3,900. Phillies' executive Bill Giles chose the latter, saving his team a whopping $1,300. Now the Phillies had a costume.

All they needed was someone to wear it. That's coming up. So once you have a bespoke mascot costume, how do you find the right performer to bring it to life? Well, if you're the Philadelphia Phillies, you ask the guy in the office who never says no to anything. Dave Raymond. I get a phone call and he said, you need to go to New York right away and get fitted for the costume. I went to West 39th Street. I walked into, you know, what I term as Jopetos puppet studio.

There were disembodied arms and foam and eyeballs, then I just went, oh my gosh, I'm getting paid to be a muppet. The fanatic debuted on April 25th, 1978. The Phillies beat the Chicago Cubs seven to nothing. Maybe it was the win or the ballpark beer, but the fans loved him from the start. That first year alone, the Philly's sold plush toys, T-shirts, pins, coloring books, and he was making money from appearances off the field too. A lot of car dealerships wanted me.

At least for the next three years, there were just enormous crowds at all of the local events. For Bonnie Erickson, all of this was fantastic news. Remember, the Phillies had bought the costume, but not the rights to the character, which meant Erickson got a hefty cut of the merchandising sales. I think the first year of merchandising, we did over $2 million. Bill Giles, the Philly's executive who passed on the fanatic copyright,

he later called it the worst decision of his career. A few years later, the team bought the character from Ericsson for $215,000. It's about $650,000 in today's money. For Ericsson, the fanatic was the start of a very successful career in the mascot world. It's a small group of people who own these baseball teams, so word gets around pretty fast. And once this was out, it spread beyond baseball.

She and Harrison went on to design more than a dozen other mascots across all four major sports leagues. UP for the Montreal Expos, Big Shot for the Philadelphia 76ers, Stuff the Magic Dragon for the Orlando Magic, KC Wolf for the Kansas City Chiefs, around half of their characters are still active today. But not every team is suited for a mascot. In 1979, the Yankees commissioned Ericsson to make one. He was a bulbous, pinstriped fellow named Dandy. According to Bonnie Ericsson's partner Wade Harrison, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner

hated Dandy so much that he was sentenced to roam the nosebleed seats. They didn't allow him lower than the second deck. And he stayed there for three years. He had a security guard with him because that could be a rough area sometimes. The performer came to us and said his mother would not allow him to do that anymore because they were going to take away the security guard, so we did not renew the lease. Erickson eventually got out of the mascot business in the 90s, and after 16 years performing as the fanatic, Dave Raymond moved on to. He passed the duties to his backup performer and started his own mascot firm. Since then, Raymond has

created more than 130 mascots from scratch, mostly for minor league and college teams. His biggest success came a few years ago when he was hired by the Philadelphia Flyers Pro-Hockey team. The result was gritty, a seven-foot-tall orange brute with bulging eyes and a maniacal grin. One reporter likened him to a nightmarish frat boy on an acid trip. Raymond was undeterred. Overcome the negativity because there will always be negativity there. I mean, that's what I told the flyers to expect. I told him to expect six months. It took like three days for it to change. Philadelphia, the city that once booed Santa Claus, embraced Gritty with open arms. In his first month alone, the character got the

flyers around $160 million worth of media exposure. That makes the cost of a modern mascot sound downright reasonable. Raymond says the creative process of designing a character like Gritty might set a team back between $80,000 and $300,000. That's the base fee he charges. Then there's ongoing work, creating duplicate costumes, taking care of repairs, and perhaps most importantly, regular cleanings. You want to try to make sure that the body odor does not get, you know, in essence, baked into the costume.

You mix one part vodka with two parts water. And at the end of every appearance, you spray the inside of the costume to kill the bacteria. The joke was two for the costume, one for the performer. But Raymond's core business is the thing he knows best. He is a bonafide mascot headhunter. Every year, he runs a mascot bootcamp. We're aspiring performers learn the tricks of the trade.

A performer needs to have a full bio to work from. What motivates this character? What does this character scared the death of? What will this character always do? What will this character never do? What will this character never do? And then you give them all that backstory and say, go have fun. It's not exactly that simple, though. For starters, you can't be claustrophobic.

You can't be afraid of a little sweat. You need to be pretty physically fit. And of course, you have to have either a natural ability or a train ability to communicate nonverbaly through movement and dance. The ones that are going to be ultimately a high level of success. You see that right away. The chosen few that make it to the big leagues can do pretty well. Raymond says the NBA pays most mascots a starting salary of $85,000 to $100,000. There's also incentive pay.

According to the sports business journal, mascots at the very top of the food chain, like the Denver Nuggets Rocky the Mountain Lion, can earn more than $600,000 per year. But those superstar wages are few and far between. of the environment that gets those jobs. And there are many mind-ally characters tolling away for $50-$100 a game and doing great work. In his trainings, Raymond emphasizes good, clean, safe, fun. To keep the crowds, owners, and sponsors happy, but also to ward off the threat of litigation. The same boisterous spirit that made the fanatic an icon

also got him in trouble. The Phillies have been sued at least six times over the years for fanatic misbehavior, including hugging a fan too hard, accidentally kicking a pregnant woman, and shooting a fan in the face with a hot dog gun. Settlements have set the Phillies back nearly $3 million. And there's one last thing that teams have to watch out for when they buy a mascot. The copyright law says that after 35 years, if something is still viable, the original copyright owners have the opportunity to renegotiate.

That 35-year clock recently expired on the fanatic. And Bonnie Erickson came knocking. She and the team settled out of court. The Philly fanatic is still very dear to my heart. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crackett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly, a Philly native, and mixed by Jeremy Jostin, with help from Lyric Boudich. Our executive team is Neil Caruth, Gabriel Roth, and Stephen Dupner. And what became of the dandy costume?

I'm afraid he had a demise. Oh no. And how do you dispose of a mascot costume? I don't want to describe it. It's a terrible process. The Frekenomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher