Underground Baseball

Yastrzemski's Muttonchops

Funky sideburns grown by straitlaced Boston Red Sox icon Carl Yastrzemski prior to the 1973 season. A turning point in America's long cultural war between “hairs” and “squares,” Yaz’s decision to grow muttonchops gave thousands of clean-cut kids all over New England permission to let their freak flags fly. By the end of the year, long hair, sideburns, wide collars, and bell bottoms had become the de rigeur off-the-field look for players across baseball. Decades later, Yaz’s righteous whiteboy ‘chops were still being namechecked by popular culture. In a May 1991 episode of The Simpsons, Bart’s friend Milhouse wants to spend $30 on a Carl Yastrzemski baseball card from 1973 "when he had big sideburns," but Bart and Martin convince him to go in with them on a copy of Radioactive Man No. 1 instead.

Youppi

Inexplicable orange-furred official mascot of the now-defunct Montreal Expos. The product of a mascot-creation firm, Youppi (whose name means "Hooray" in French) was commissioned by the team's marketing department to replace Souki, the Expos' original space creature mascot, in 1979. ("The kids were afraid of him," a club official admitted to the Washington Post in 2005.) By contrast, Youppi was engineered to project a teddy bear-like cuddliness akin to Jim Henson's muppets. (In fact, one of Henson's own designers worked on the Youppi Project.) An orange goliath of indeterminate parentage, Youppi capered on top of the Olympic Stadium dugouts in the manner of the Phillie Phanatic, to whom he is often compared. Where the Phanatic was universally loved, however, Youppi routinely got under the skin of opposing players and managers—most famously during a 1989 altercation with Dodger manager Tom Lasorda which saw Youppi "ejected" from the game by the home plate umpire. With the dissolution of the Expos following the 2004 season, Youppi switched allegiance to hockey and became the official mascot of the NHL's Montreal Canadiens.

Bombo Rivera

Strong-armed Puerto Rican outfielder and novelty song inspiration of the 1970s. Jesus “Bombo” Rivera played for three teams over the course of a seven-year major league career, before finishing up in Japan in 1986. Best known as a Minnesota Twin, the happy-go-lucky Rivera became something of a cult figure in the Twin Cities, thanks in large part to his distinctive nickname. (A bombo is a cylindrical bass drum used in Latin American music.) In 1978, the novelty ditty, “Fare Thee Well, Bombo,” was written in his honor.

Eephus Pitch

Tantalizingly slow, high-arcing trick pitch first invented by Truett “Rip” Sewell of the Pittsburgh Pirates some time in the 1930s. So named by Sewell’s teammate Maurice Van Robays, who told inquiring reporters the pitch was called eephus because “eephus don’t mean nothin’, and that’s what that pitch is—nothin’.” Sewell rode his eephus to back-to-back 21-win seasons in 1943 and 1944. His most famous use of the pitch came in the 1946 All-Star Game, when he lobbed three straight eephi at Ted Williams, the last of which the Splendid Splinter deposited into the right field stands for a home run. Copycat versions of the Eephus include Bill Lee’s Leephus Ball, Steve Hamilton’s Folly Floater, and Dave LaRoche’s La Lob

Redlegs

Alternate name adopted by the Cincinnati Reds whenever they fear that fans will think they’re Communists. Originally known as the Red Stockings, and then renamed the Redlegs, the National League’s Cincinnati franchise has been known as the Reds for most of its 130+ year history. But from 1954 to 1959, at the height of the McCarthy Era, the Queen City became home to the Redlegs once more, as nervous owners despaired of a patriotic backlash after “Reds Defeat Yanks” appeared as the headline on a spring training newspaper article. (Curiously, the name “Red Stockings” appears in the club’s official logo during this bizarre period.)

Li’l Rastus

Demeaning name given to an African-American youth adopted by the 1908 Detroit Tigers as their team mascot. The racially charged term—long used by whites to perpetuate a stereotype of smiling, carefree “Negroes”—was reportedly bestowed personally by Tiger legend Ty Cobb, a notorious racist, who insisted that the child sleep under his bed for luck. The Tigers and the Boston Red Sox share the dubious distinction of being the last two all-white teams in baseball, failing to integrate until 1958, more than 11 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.

Spaceman

Nickname bestowed upon Bill Lee, free-spirited southpaw reliever known for his long hair, left-wing politics, and (in his later years) bushy mountain man-style beard. Lee won 119 games over the course of 14 seasons with the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos, but it was his bizarre off-the-field behavior that earned him his extraterrestrial moniker. Lee was once fined $250 by the league for admitting to an interviewer that he sprinkled marijuana on his buckwheat pancakes, He protested Red Sox’ management’s decision to change the color scheme of the team’s caps by affixing a beanie propellor to the top of one and wearing it out onto the field. On other occasions, he entered games wearing a gas mask and a Daniel Boone cap. “I always understood everything Casey Stengel said,” Lee’s college coach Rod Dedeaux once observed. “But I knew that all my hours with Casey helped prepare me for Bill Lee.” Lee’s most productive years came in the mid-1970’s—as was the case with many who shared his countercultural worldview. The junkballing left-hander helped pitch the Red Sox into the World Series in 1975, won 17 games for the club three years in a row, and took part in an infamous brawl with the hated New York Yankees. Boston management was not quite so enamored with the Spaceman, however. Lee’s distaste for authority was legendary. He constantly baited manager Don Zimmer, whom he dubbed “the Gerbil,” and walked out on the team after his best friend Bernie Carbo was traded. Fed up, the Red Sox traded Lee to the Montreal Expos before the 1979 season. He played his final four seasons in the Great White North before retiring to Vermont, where he continues to play ball in senior leagues and preach his unique philosophy.

Mr. Met

Grinning, baseball-headed team mascot of the New York Mets. Created for the cover of the 1963 Met yearbook (and possibly modeled after Cincinnati’s Mr. Red), Mr. Met broke Major League Baseball's mascot barrier in 1964, becoming the game’s first modern live-action mascot. Unlike other team totems who have courted controversy, like the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo or the San Diego Chicken, Mr. Met has been content to rev up the Shea Stadium crowd and fire t-shirts into the stands using an air cannon. In the 1990s, he gained national exposure by appearing with his heretofore unseen inamorata Lady Met in a series of lighthearted TV promos for ESPN’s Sportscenter.

Bird

Aviary nickname bestowed upon Detroit Tigers’ pitching prodigy Mark Fidrych, a reference to his resemblance to Sesame Street’s shambling canary, Big Bird. The year was 1976. Disco was gathering steam, the Ford administration was struggling to Whip Inflation Now—or at least before Election Day—and a scrawny kid with an unruly mop of curly blonde hair was captivating stadium crowds with his freewheeling antics. No, it wasn’t Peter Frampton, although he had a pretty good year too. It was Mark Fidrych, a 21-year-old pitching prodigy from Worcester, Massachusetts who seemingly came out of nowhere to win 19 games that year, capturing Rookie of the Year honors. But it was Fidrych’s behavior on the mound, not his contributions to the won-loss ledger, that endeared him to fans from coast to coast. The Bird was a natural showman whose ritualized shtick included talking to the ball before each pitch, getting down on his hands and knees to clean the pitching rubber, and running around the diamond shaking hands with his teammates after a victory. Fidrych later denied that he actually conversed with the baseball (“What I’m really doing is talking out loud to myself, not the ball,” he said. “I’ll tell myself to bring my arm down, things like that.”) However, the very fact that he was talking at all, out there on the mound by himself in front of 30,000 people, was enough to pique the interest of baseball audiences looking for a distraction after years of Vietnam, Watergate, and waning interest in the national pastime. And talking wasn’t all Fidrych did on the pitcher’s mound. Upon getting the news that he had made the Tigers’ big-league roster for 1976, The Bird and his girlfriend reportedly celebrated by having sex on the mound at the team’s spring training complex in Lakeland, Florida. On another occasion, The Bird realized during warm-ups that he forgotten to don his protective cup. Unfazed, he simply pulled down his uniform pants and put it on right there on the mound. 1976 proved to be Fidrych’s only year in the national limelight. He blew out his knee in spring training of the following season and was plagued by multiple arm problems thereafter. He made numerous attempts to return to the game, but years of surgery and painful rehab slowly sapped the Bird’s magic wing of all its power. Fidrych retired in 1982 and settled down on a pig farm in his native Massachusetts, where he earned a living paving driveways and playing semipro ball.

“Mistake by the Lake”

Derisive term for Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, home to the Indians from 1932 to 1993. A dank, cavernous monstrosity with all the charm of a urinal, the ballpark (later renamed Cleveland Stadium—as if that enhanced its cachet) could accommodate more than 78,000 patrons, but rarely attracted even a third that many. The lake in question was nearby Lake Erie, whose frigid winds often made playing there an unbearable chore for the Indians and their opponents. The Mistake was mercifully rectified via demolition in November 1996.