The Phanatic Deserves Justice!
We all love mascots, at least we all should love mascots. The baseball world is full of colorful, engaging, and fun mascots. While this isn’t as true in Major League Baseball, there are still at the least a handful of quality mascots that can make a game more entertaining because of their presence. Chief among all of them is the Phillie Phanatic. I’ve literally never met a person alive who didn’t like the Phanatic’s antics on and off the field. Of course, I’ve never met Tommy Lasorda.
For the uninitiated, noted producer of fine wines Lasorda is a tad bit of a mascot hater. There was an incident where he threatened to strangle the San Diego Chicken, but the less we talk about that mascot the better. In 1989 he famously had the Montreal Expos mascot, Youppi!, ejected from a game for taunting the Los Angeles Dodgers dugout. It was the first time in MLB history when a mascot had been ejected from a game. It wasn’t all that surprising at the time, not to those who were aware of an altercation the previous season between Lasorda and the Phanatic.
See, Lasorda had a problem throughout his managerial career, a decided inability to take a joke. This is ironic since Lasorda’s physical appearance as well as dubious choices when it came to espousing racist views make him an easy target for many a joke. But, I digress, the reason that we’re talking about Lasorda right now isn’t his racism, big gut, or Humpty Dumpty body. Rather, on August 28th, 1988 the then Dodgers manager committed assault and battery live on a baseball field. No one seemed to care then and even fewer people care today, but a battery is a battery and I’ll be damned if Lasorda didn’t batter the hell out of the Phanatic.
The incident started innocently enough. The Phanatic was riding around Veterans Stadium on his ATV with a half-size Lasorda doll. Lasorda took great exception to this and stormed out of the dugout with a quickness the likes of which he never showed before or after. In the process of confronting the Phanatic, he attempted to steal the Phanatic’s ATV. When that failed he chased the Phanatic down, threw him to the ground, and proceeded to beat him with the Phanatic’s own Lasorda doll. The Phanatic bravely rode away on his ATV after getting away from his attacker’s clutches.
Most people know of this incident, what they don’t know is that Lasorda has evaded any punishment for his crimes his entire life. Think about it for a second. He got one mascot ejected from a game and he threatened to strangle another. That he attacked and then battered the Phanatic is behavior that is in line with his past and soon to come mascot related activities. Yet, despite there being video evidence of his actions on this fateful night and clear behavior patterns at play the rotund Dodgers manager never faced consequences for his actions.
It doesn’t matter one iota that the rest of the world has moved on, I have not and everyone else needs to reexamine the case. A beloved icon of the sports world was battered around the baseball field by a deranged man who already had a loaded gut on his person to use as a weapon. That wasn’t good enough though, he had to use a doll lovingly crafted by the Phanatic’s own hands to bludgeon the Phanatic to the ground. That our hero managed to get up and drive away is both a testament to his mettle as a being and to the relative ineffectiveness of Lasorda’s vicious attack. The time has come for Lasorda to answer for his crimes, the Phanatic deserves justice and he deserves it now!
