Phake Phanatic
By ice rivers
- 317 reads
The Phillie Phanatic is the official mascot of the Philadelphia Phillies, a Major League Baseball franchise based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This character is a huge, hairy, overweight green bird with an extensible tongue, gawking eyes and pink eyelashes. The bird is reminiscent of the moa, an extiinct flightless giant bird whose extinction was hurried along by giant eagles. The football team in Philadelphia is the Eagles. The Phanatic supposedly hails from the Galapagos and bears a resemblance to Big Bird.
Although popular with the fanatic fans of Philadelphia, the Phanatic is not as popular with opposing teams and has been involved in more than a few skirmishes, the most infamous of which occurred when Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda tackled the bird after the bird had trashed a replica of Lasorda's baseball uniform. You can see the whole fiasco on Youtube.
A legal conflict occurred in 2019 that attracted the attention of Zach Jingle. Zach was/is a venture capitalist who had sold off 24 of his "companies" and become a billioniaire. Zach enjoyed posing as a lower middle class American rabble rouser and he had the bread to do it. Zach's favorite instrument of chaos was beer. One of Zach's regular exercises in crowd control was to pick out a beer vendor at a ball park and give the guy a couple thousand dollars. The vendor would then distribute free brews to rowdy sections of ballparks which had the inevitably intended effect of rousing the rabble.
When Zach heard about the situation with the Phanatic, he made a special trip to Phiadelphia. In 2019, the ballclub had sued the creators of the original Phanatic alleging an illegal reclamation over property rights to the Phanatic. The Phillies responded by mangling the mascot. They reshaped his nose, changed his hair style, put stars behind his eyes, gave him a blue tail and added scales to his arms.
The new Phanatic, the imposter Phanatic,showed up in COVID 2020 but without fans, it didn't really matter. The "fans" themselves were imposters; a bunch of carboard cutouts with fake stadium sounds pumped into the building. When they finally admitted fans, Zach Jingle was amongst them. He paid off the vendor. Zach sat back in his cheap seats. A rowdy group in the reserved section behind third base were gifted with a free beer or two for every one that they purchased, With Vince Velasquez on the mound, the Phillies fell behind immediately. The booing started. The fugazi Phanatic came out an tried to get a cheer going from the iron throated group behind third base. Instead of rallying, the third base crowd, fully roused started booing the shit out of the Phanatic, letting it be known that they phreaking hated him. Encouraged by the vociferous chaos emanating from behind third base, the rest of the crowd picked up the and filled the stadium with what sounded like one gigantic voice "Phuck Da Phake" reading from a banner that mysteriously showed up in right field.
The fans were booing the mascot.
An imposter had energized a rebellion against another imposter.
Once again, rabble was successfully roused.
In order to stop the unintended consequence, the Phillies settled with the designers of the mascot and the original Phanatic is back.
I wish we could say the same about Big Bird and the moa.
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