Friday, December 14, 2007

Philling In: All Your Mascot Names Sucked Anyway

Further dispatches from the continuing saga of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs mascot: from a pool of what was surely dozens of entries, IronPigs management selected 'PorkChop' as the winner and formally christened the big gray suit earlier this month. Yet another OneWord, but it's harmless and cute enough, right?

Turns out that 'Pork Chop' is kinda sorta racist to the Hispanic community. Or the Portuguese community. Or whoever. A couple weeks later, I'm still a little confused. The IronPigs reacted swiftly, re-naming the mascot 'Ferrous' (making a local-TV commercial parody of Ferris Bueller's Day Off inevitable). And while it's not clear that the new name was also entered into the original name contest, I find the official reaction captured in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated quite illuminating:

"The name PorkChop was not much better than the other names submitted," spokesman Matt Provence says. "To 'cave,' you need to give up something. We didn't really give up anything."

Yeah, screw you, winning fan! Go IronPigs!

- On the same page of the aformentioned SI, there's a great feature that asks all major league GMs to provide a "one-word assessment" of their clubs after the winter meetings. Gillick's response is "Close," which is more perfect than he knows. It's probably one of the best responses next to the A's Billy Beane ("Healing") and the Braves' Frank Wren ("Recharging"). The dunce cap is split between the Royals' Dayton Moore ("Futuristic") and the Astros' Wacky Ed Wade ("Solidifying").

- Speaking of Ed Wade, he proved he's still got it by trading for an aging Miguel Tejada days before he was outed for buying steroids in the Mitchell Report. Enjoy your new GM, Astros fans.

- And speaking of the Mitchell Report (transitions are dynamite today), the fallout for the Phillies is rather inconsequential. Like most of the guys named in the report, the former Phils that bought the juice/cow hormones either weren't that good to begin with (Gary Bennett), were already under suspicion (Lenny Dykstra), or had already been exposed (David Bell). How much did this cost MLB again?

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