[Westheim]

Same old madness in Coon City: this week we had another meeting regarding the franchise fielding one of those anthropomorphized mascots before and during games. You know, stick some loser in some old grey rug vaguely resembling a raccoon and have him hand out baseballs to kids to make them shut up. We’ve been talking about this for a long time, several months. My PR advisor, an emotionally frigid but highly professional woman named Maud, who’s in her late 40s and – I suspect – has never been touched by a male living being in her life … wants the mascot to be colored brown, like the raccoon in our logo, but I have this stupid grey rug lying around because who gives a ****??

Nothing against Maud, by the way, she has a lot on her hands, trying to keep by Jack Daniels and barbiturate levels just right so I don’t bring my pump action shotgun to press conferences and blast the always-charming Agitator’s beat reporter’s head right off.

In the Agitator’s case, “beat reporter” *literally* means beating up in print the people you are interviewing, by the way.

So, yeah, the mascot. It’s been supposed to be there last year, since the Spots Illuminated ran a report on the five best mascots in the ABL, and of course the Raccoons didn’t even have one and again were only mentioned in the mid-pages, Sports Tragedies section. SI named the Salem Wolves’ mascot the best in the ABL, a light blue / light grey wolf with a giant nose and ears and an almost obnoxious permanent grin, with a pink tongue sticking out between the fangs. They do that baseballs-for-the-kids ****, too.

Of course, Oregon is Oregon, and – if you come from somewhere else, like California, where there’s lots of people – Oregon is small, like one of those charming little towns on side roads in New England, in which everybody knows everybody else. Coming in second in Oregon almost certainly means coming in last, and we don’t want to come in last. Not again!

So we’re on the mascot, but we can’t agree on the color, while we actually do have hired somebody to wear the costume and we’ve been paying him (slavishly, I admit) for the last eight months. His name is Chad, he is 20 and mildly - … I don’t want to say ******ed, but he’s dropped out of community college after he spent all his days and nights sniffing glue and god-knows-what-else. He’s easily distracted by the simplest of things. Like colors. Or kittens. A runt-of-the-litter baseball team offering him the lowest of pathetic jobs – way, WAY below someone who clears clogged up sewers, for example – is probably the only chance he’ll get in life to earn his own bread. Who says the Raccoons aren’t charitable?

Slappy, the janitor, also tried to get his wife’s brother the mascot job, but the brother bailed out when he learned that they were talking about the Portland Raccoons, the major league baseball team, and NOT – as he, hard of hearing, had at first assumed – the Portland Baboons, a team in a recreational, mixed-gender Sunday softball league. He only wanted to work for a cool team.

I vaguely remember Maud wrestling the shotgun from me when I learned of his reply. But I was dazed by the whisky and he drugs and I can’t really tell anymore.

Anyway! So, the mascot thing. Chad was the only guy we could get other than some mid-50s guy named Bob who had just been released from jail for - … I think it was indecent exposure, and Maud didn’t want him around kids. Chad, constantly high on fumes, didn’t mind working for a run-down franchise and making a total donkey of himself between innings. He didn’t mind a lot of things…

Which can’t be said of the personnel we have, donning the actual uniforms, some of which are bitching and moaning about the team’s un-success again, and everybody’s blaming everybody else. Hey, I know it’s the fifth consecutive losing season, despite all the drinking and pills I can still count that far.

Merely Neil Reece is happily going along. He basically has his retirement contract signed, and has recently started selling his body for TV advertisement. It’s less dodgy than it sounds. Well, actually … For the last two weeks he’s appeared in nationwide commercials for a brand new salty, buttery spread with a strong radish flavor. I have to admire Neil, I mean, he’s running around the outfield and jumping into the fences 150 games a year, and for the commercial he actually managed to shoulder a bat, said some nonsense crap like “This makes every breakfast a home run!” without wetting his own pants in mad laughter, and THEN to bite off a slice of bread, profoundly soiled with a thick layer of salty radish spread, and smile into the camera for three seconds without crying and / or vomiting.

They originally wanted Daniel Sharp, who despite playing for a team with the image of a third-rate orphanage in Zimbabwe has some cool vibe with teens and young adults (Maud said that, I don’t give a dime about what teens think), but simply the smell of the evil pseudo-food made him run. But not Neil! Such a strong man! We need more of him!

And Chad, stop sniffing the empty toner container.