Senior Citizens vs. Mascots

I originally meant to write a long post about a recent trip to see the Staten Island Yankees play the Brooklyn Cyclones, which included my first trip on the Staten Island Ferry and a strange run-in with a large group of British tourists who were crazily celebrating on said ferry after the game as if the UK had just won the World Cup. Very bizarre.

But while my memory has faded to the point where a longer post would be even less entertaining than it normally would, I do want to share one anecdote. And only partly because it involves mascots.

Like all minor league games, those in Staten Island evidently involve a whole lot of distracting people between innings. Included in this effort are three bovine mascots, pictured below:



I'll get to the point. The game was a very well played pitchers' duel, and when the Yankees were trying to clinch a 1-0 win in the ninth, the mascots were cheering them on from the top of the dugout, as in the photos above. There was a very old man at the end of our row who was clearly agitated by having his view blocked by overly enthusiastic foam cattle. I took a friend's camera and moved in to get a closer shot of the mascots. As I was focusing the lens, the codger got my attention and gestured toward the phone. "Excuse me," he said, with a strange air of optimism, "does that operate a death ray?"