5. Sports Mascots

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things – Sports Mascots

Podcast: The Economics of Everyday Things
Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Network)
Episode: 5 – Sports Mascots
Date: January 15, 2026

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Overview of the Episode

In this episode, Zachary Crockett investigates the fascinating world behind sports mascots, focusing on their origins, economic impact, and the colorful personalities who bring them to life. Using the Philadelphia Phillies’ legendary Phanatic as a case study, Crockett explores how mascots have become invaluable assets to sports franchises—not just as crowd-pleasers, but as major moneymakers. With interviews from the Phanatic’s original performer and designer, as well as a look at mascot economics, the episode uncovers the hidden mechanisms and surprising significance of these oversized, furry mascots.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Birth of Modern Sports Mascots

• [00:51] Zachary sets the scene at a baseball game, introducing the Philly Phanatic and highlighting the mascot’s role in livening up the ballpark.
• [01:44] Dave Raymond, the first to wear the Phanatic costume, recalls:

  “I could throw, I could catch, I could do cartwheels. Not a lot of gymnastics, but I could dance, I could move really well. I kind of fancied myself as being the secret weapon.”

• In the late 1970s, the Phillies were struggling with attendance and needed a creative draw. Inspiration came from the popularity of the San Diego Chicken, a wild and raunchy mascot who attracted crowds in California.
  • [03:16] Dave Raymond:

    “This chicken character is just out of his mind and people are actually coming to the game because they're hearing about him.”

• Earlier Phillies mascots (Philadelphia Phil & Phyllis) were stiff “walking logos” with little entertainment value.

2. Designing the Phanatic

• [04:12] Bonnie Erickson, co-creator of the Muppets (think “Miss Piggy”), was hired to design a new mascot to appeal to young fans.
  • [04:26] Bonnie Erickson:

    “The two old men, Statler and Waldorf. I also did George the Janitor. Probably the most famous is Miss Piggy.”

• The Phillies’ rationale: entice a younger fanbase and make the ballpark experience memorable.
• Erickson visits Philadelphia to research the team’s notoriously tough fans:
  • [05:03] Bonnie Erickson:

    “We heard that they'd booed Santa Claus, so that was pretty daunting.”

• Erickson’s design yielded a green, flightless bird from the Galapagos, with exaggerated features and movement for physical comedy.
  • [05:23] Dave Raymond:

    “He's a green flightless bird from the Galapagos Islands. He's 300 plus pounds depending on what day of the week you weigh him.”

  • [05:31] Mascots are nonverbal; the design focused on expressive motion.

3. The Business of Mascots: Rights, Merch, and Money

• The contract: Phillies chose to buy only the costume, not the character’s copyright, saving $1,300—but sacrificing millions long-term.
• [08:18] Dave Raymond is tapped (due to his reliable “yes man” attitude) to embody the Phanatic, leading to:

  “I walked into...what I term as Geppetto’s puppet studio...I’m getting paid to be a muppet.”

• [08:55] The Phanatic debuts in 1978 to instant acclaim, boosting sales in merchandise and event appearances.
  • First-year merchandising brought in over $2 million.
  • [09:39] Bonnie Erickson:

    “I think the first year of merchandising, we did over $2 million.”

• Phillies executive Bill Giles later called his decision to forgo the copyright “the worst decision of his career.”
• A few years later, Phillies had to buy back the rights for $215,000 (~$650,000 today).

4. The Mascot Industry Grows

• Erickson and her husband create mascots for dozens of sports franchises.
  • Successful mascots: Youppi! (Montreal Expos), Big Shot (Philadelphia 76ers), Stuff the Magic Dragon (Orlando Magic), KC Wolf (Kansas City Chiefs).
• Not every mascot fits—e.g., the Yankees’ “Dandy” was relegated to the nosebleed seats after owner George Steinbrenner hated him.
  • [11:01] Story from Wade Harrison:

    “They didn’t allow him lower than the second deck...He had a security guard with him.”

5. Mascots in Modern Sports: Gritty’s Case

• Dave Raymond’s next big success: “Gritty” for the Philadelphia Flyers.
  • Gritty was initially polarizing but quickly embraced by Philadelphia.
  • [12:12] Dave Raymond:

    “Overcome the negativity because there’ll always be negativity there...I told [the Flyers] to expect six months. It took like three days for it to change.”

  • In one month, Gritty generated $160 million in media exposure for the Flyers.
• Modern mascot creation costs: Between $80,000 and $300,000; additional costs include duplicate costumes, repairs, and cleaning (vodka + water is the secret!).

6. Becoming a Mascot: Training, Perks, and Pitfalls

• Raymond runs a mascot bootcamp for aspiring performers, teaching character backstory, movement, and physical fitness.
  • [13:37] Dave Raymond:

    “A performer needs to have a full bio to work from...and then you say, go have fun.”

• Top NBA mascots earn between $85,000–$100,000, with stars like Rocky the Mountain Lion (Denver Nuggets) making over $600,000/year.
  • Most minor league mascots make just $50–$100 per game.
  • [14:41] Dave Raymond:

    “It’s a minor fraction of 1%...there are many minor league characters toiling away for $50 to $100 a game.”

• Legal risks: The Phillies have paid nearly $3 million in settlements for mascot-related injuries (e.g., the Phanatic hugging too hard, hot dog cannon incidents).

7. Mascot Copyright and Legacy

• After 35 years, original copyright holders can renegotiate; Bonnie Erickson recently settled with the Phillies on Phanatic rights.
  • [15:58] Bonnie Erickson:

    “The Philly Fanatic is still very dear to my heart.”

• Dandy, the failed Yankees mascot, met an untimely end.
  • [16:32] Bonnie Erickson:

    “I’m afraid he had a demise.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On mascot design:

  “I wanted something that would be funny if you just watched it walk.” – Bonnie Erickson [05:31]

• On the value (and pitfalls) of copyright:

  “Bill Giles...later called it the worst decision of his career.” – Zachary Crockett [09:45]

• On mascot performer requirements:

  “You want to try to make sure that the body odor does not get, in essence, baked into the costume. You mix one part vodka with two parts water...” – Dave Raymond [13:01]

• On bootcamp philosophy:

  “What motivates this character? What is this character scared to death of?...and then you say, go have fun.” – Dave Raymond [13:37]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

| Time | Segment | |-----------|--------------------------------------------| | 00:51 | Introduction to mascots & Philly Phanatic | | 01:44 | Dave Raymond’s entry as a performer | | 03:05 | Inspiration from San Diego Chicken | | 04:12 | Interview with designer Bonnie Erickson | | 08:18 | Dave Raymond’s mascot induction | | 08:55 | Phanatic’s debut and rise | | 10:09 | Expanding the mascot business | | 12:12 | Creation & acceptance of Gritty | | 13:01 | Mascot maintenance and costs | | 13:37 | Mascot bootcamps and performer insight | | 14:41 | Mascot salaries and job realities | | 15:37 | Copyright law and mascot ownership | | 16:32 | Fate of the Yankees' Dandy mascot |

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Tone and Style

The episode is energetic, witty, and packed with quirky tidbits and behind-the-scenes stories. Crockett’s narration is lighthearted and blends economics with pop culture, making the business of mascots entertaining and relatable, even for non-sports fans.

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Summary:
This episode reveals mascots as more than just costumed distractions—they are carefully crafted characters with major economic impact. From creative origins and legal drama to brand-building and high stakes entertainment, mascots play a surprising (and lucrative) role in the business of sports.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

When you go to a baseball game, there are a few things you can count on. You'll hear the vendors hollering over the din of the crowd. You'll smell the peanuts, the hot dogs, the ludicrously overpriced beers. And if you're at Citizens bank park in Philadelphia, you'll see a six and a half foot tall fuzzy green beast waddling across the field in search of trouble. Even if you're not a sports fan, you've probably heard of the Philly fanatic. Sports Illustrated called him the best mascot in history. He has sold millions of dollars worth of merchandise and he brings families to the ballpark at a time when fewer people are going to baseball games. How exactly does he do that? Well, it has a lot to do with the guy who originally wore the costume.

[Dave Raymond]

I could throw, I could catch, I could do cartwheels. Not a lot of gymnastics, but I could dance, I could move really well. I kind of fancied myself as being the secret weapon.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, sports mascots. The secret weapon you just heard from. That's Dave Raymond. His story starts back in the late 1970s. As a sophomore in college, he landed a summer internship with the Phillies.

[Dave Raymond]

I was in the promotions office and you know, my dad had said, look, when you get this job, you do whatever they ask you you to do. Don't say no to anything. So I was stocking shelves, I was cleaning bathrooms up in the executive offices. And then I might be taking the national anthem singer to dinner. But that all changed in the spring of 78.

[Zachary Crockett]

At the time, the Phillies had a problem on their hands. Attendance wasn't too hot and the promotions department was trying to get more butts in the seats. On the other side of the country, someone had an intriguing solution.

[Commercial Announcer]

More chickening around here as we go to the bottom of the sixth inning.

[Dave Raymond]

The famous San Diego chicken changing dancing partners here.

[Zachary Crockett]

Out In California, a 20 year old kid named Ted Giannulis was making waves at San Diego Padres games by dressing up as a chicken and cavorting around the field.

[Dave Raymond]

The chicken kind of had a raunchy. He actually chugged beer through his beak. This chicken character is just out of his mind and people are actually coming to the game because they're hearing about him.

[Zachary Crockett]

Professional sports mascots were not a new idea. The Phillies even had their own Philadelphia Phil and Philadelphia Phillis, a pair of twins in Revolutionary War outfits. But they weren't designed to entertain.

[Dave Raymond]

They were more like walking logos or symbols. The performer would wear these big heavy body suits made out of some pieces of wood. They had no mobility.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Phillies saw the impact that this chicken was having in San Diego and they decided to up their mascot game with a new character. So they went straight to the best people in the business.

[Bonnie Erickson]

My name is Bonnie Erickson and I was a dish designer of the Philly Fanatic.

[Zachary Crockett]

Erickson had been a part of the original design team for the Muppet Show. Let's just say you've seen her work.

[Bonnie Erickson]

The two old men, Statler and Waldorf. I also did George the Janitor. Probably the most famous is Miss Piggy.

[Zachary Crockett]

She had just started a character design firm with her husband, Wade Harrison, and the Phillies wanted some of that Muppet mojo.

[Bonnie Erickson]

The rationale the Phillies gave us was they needed to encourage younger people to become baseball fans. I'd watched baseball games, but I certainly didn't know that much about the whole process. So one of the first things we did was go down to Philly and ask them about their audience.

[Zachary Crockett]

And what'd you see?

[Bonnie Erickson]

Well, we heard a lot about the fans. We heard that they'd booed Santa Claus, so that was pretty daunting.

[Zachary Crockett]

Erickson mocked up some sketches of a curious creature with a megaphone snout and a pear shaped body. The Fanatic was designed to be on the move.

[Dave Raymond]

He's a green flightless bird from the Galapagos Islands. He's 300 plus pounds depending on what day of the week you weigh him.

[Bonnie Erickson]

I wanted something that would be funny if you just watched it walk. Mascots are non speaking characters. They have to transfer everything that they want to say through their body motion. That's why the Fanatic has feather eyebrows. Feather tail things that are showing some action.

[Zachary Crockett]

When Erickson sold the character to the Phillies, she gave them a choice. They could buy the costume and the copyright to the character for 5200 bucks, or they could just buy the costume for $3900. Phillies executive Bill Giles chose the latter, saving his team a whopping $1,300. Now the Phillies had a costume. All they needed was someone to wear it. That's coming up. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by crowdstreet. You're the kind of person who reads the fine print, who likes to make your own calls, who's built a life, not to mention a career, by thinking independently. So why shouldn't you invest that way too? Crowdstreet is built for self directed investors who want direct access to private market opportunities like private equity, private credit and real estate. Vetted offerings, transparent data and clear diligence summaries help you make confident, informed choices. Because independence doesn't stop at your desk or your business or your weekend projects, it should extend to your investments too. Invest the way you live independently. Learn [e-mail].

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[Zachary Crockett]

So once you have a bespoke mascot costume, how do you find the right performer to bring it to life? Well, if you're the Philadelphia Phillies, you ask the guy in the office who never says no to anything, Dave Raymond.

[Dave Raymond]

I get a phone call and he said you need to go to New York right away and get fitted for the costume. I went to West 39th Street. I walked into, you know, what I term as Geppetto's puppet studio. There were disembodied arms and foam and eyeballs, and I just went, oh, my gosh. I. I'm getting paid to be a muppet.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Fanatic debuted on April 25, 1978. The Phillies beat the Chicago Cubs 7 to nothing. Maybe it was the Wynn or the Ballpark beer, but the fans loved him from the start. That first year alone, the Phillies sold plush toys, T shirts, pins, coloring books, and he was making money from appearances off the field, too.

[Dave Raymond]

A lot of car dealerships wanted me, at least for the next three years. There were just enormous crowds at all of the local events.

[Zachary Crockett]

For Bonnie Erickson, all of this was fantastic news. Remember, the Phillies had bought the costume but not the rights to the character, which meant Erickson got a hefty cut of the merchandising sales.

[Bonnie Erickson]

I think the first year of merchandising, we did over $2 million.

[Zachary Crockett]

Bill Giles, the Phillies executive who passed on the Fanatic copyright, he later called it the worst decision of his career. A few years later, the team bought the character from Erickson for $215,000. That's about 650,000 in today's money. For Ericsson, the Fanatic was the start of a very successful career in the mascot world.

[Bonnie Erickson]

It's a small group of people who own these baseball teams, so word gets around pretty fast. And once this and spread beyond baseball.

[Zachary Crockett]

She and Harrison went on to design more than a dozen other mascots across all four major sports leagues youp for the Montreal Expos Big Shot for the Philadelphia 76ers. Stuff the Magic Dragon for the Orlando Magic, KC Wolf for the Kansas City Chiefs. Around half of their characters are still active today. But not every team is suited for a mascot. In 1979, the Yankees commissioned Erickson to make one. He was a bulbous, pinstriped fellow named Dandy. According to Bonnie Erickson's partner, Wade Harrison, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner hated Dandy so much that he was sentenced to roam the nosebleed seats.

[Commercial Announcer]

They didn't allow him lower than the second deck, and he stayed there for three years. He had a security guard with him because that could be a rough area. Sometimes the performer came to us and said his mother would not allow him to do that anymore because they were going to take away the security guard. So we did not renew the lease.

[Zachary Crockett]

Erickson eventually got out of the mascot business in the 90s and after 16 years performing as the Fanatic, Dave, Raymond moved on, too. He passed the duties to his backup performer and started his own mascot firm. Since then, Raymond has created more than 130 mascots from scratch, mostly for minor league and college teams. His biggest success came a few years ago when he was hired by the Philadelphia Flyers pro hockey team. The result was Gritty, a seven foot tall orange brute with bulging eyes and a maniacal grin. One reporter likened him to a nightmarish frat boy on an acid trip. Raymond was undeterred.

[Dave Raymond]

Overcome the negativity because there'll always be negativity there. I mean, that's what I told the Flyers to expect. I told them to expect six months. It took like three days for it to change.

[Zachary Crockett]

Philadelphia, the city that once booed Santa Claus, embraced Gritty with open arms. In his first month alone, the character got the flyers around $160 million worth of media exposure. That makes the cost of a modern mascot sound downright reasonable. Raymond says the creative process of designing a character like Gritty might set a team back between $80,000 and $300,000. That's the base fee he charges. Then there's ongoing work creating duplicate costumes, taking care of repairs, and perhaps most importantly, regular cleanings.

[Dave Raymond]

You want to try to make sure that the body odor does not get, in essence, baked into the costume. You mix one part vodka with two parts water, and at the end of every appearance, you spray the inside of the costume to kill the bacteria. The joke was two for the costume, one for the performer.

[Zachary Crockett]

But Raymond's core business is the thing he knows best. He is a bonafide mascot headhunter. Every year he runs a mascot boot camp where aspiring performers learn the tricks of the trade.

[Dave Raymond]

A performer needs to have a full bio to work from. What motivates this character? What is this character scared to death of? What will this character always do? What will this character never do? And then you give them all that backstory and you say, go have fun.

[Zachary Crockett]

It's not exactly that simple, though. For starters, you can't be claustrophobic. You can't be afraid of a little sweat. You need to be pretty physically fit.

[Dave Raymond]

And of course, you have to have either a natural ability or a trained ability to communicate non verbally through movement and dance. The ones that are going to be ultimately a high level of success. You see that right away.

[Zachary Crockett]

The chosen few that make it to the big leagues can do pretty well. Raymond says the NBA pays most mascots a starting salary of 85 to $100,000. There's also incentive pay. According to the Sports Business Journal, mascots at the very top of the food chain, like the Denver Nuggets Rocky the Mountain lion can earn more than $600,000 per year, but those superstar wages are few and far between.

[Dave Raymond]

It's a minor fraction of 1% of the environment that gets those jobs, and there are many minor league characters toiling away for $50 to $100 a game and doing great work in his trainings.

[Zachary Crockett]

Raymond emphasizes good, clean, safe fun to keep the crowd's owners and sponsors happy, but also to ward off the threat of litigation. The same boisterous spirit that made the Fanatic an icon also got him in trouble. The Phillies have been sued at least six times over the years for fanatic misbehavior, including hugging a fan too hard, accidentally kicking a pregnant woman and shooting a fan in the face with a hot dog gun. Settlements have set the Phillies back nearly $3 million. And there's one last thing that teams have to watch out for when they buy a mascot.

[Bonnie Erickson]

The copyright law says that after 35 years, if something is still viable, the original copyright owners have the opportunity to renegotiate.

[Zachary Crockett]

That 35 year clock recently expired on the Fanatic, and Bonnie Erickson came knocking. She and the team settled out of court.

[Bonnie Erickson]

The Philly Fanatic is still very dear to my heart.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly, a Philly native, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston with help from Lyric Bowdich. Our executive team is Neal Carruth, Gabriel Roth and Stephen Dubner. And what became of the dandy costume?

[Bonnie Erickson]

I'm afraid he had a demise.

[Zachary Crockett]

Oh no. And how do you dispose of a mascot costume?

[Bonnie Erickson]

I don't want to describe it. It's a terrible.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of everything.

[Bonnie Erickson]

Stitcher.

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