[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s First Baseball Mascot"

[rfmcdonald]

In this weekend's Historicist feature, Chris Bateman writes about the baseball mascot of a late 19th century baseball team, the Torontos. Back them, "mascot" was the subject of a good deal of offputting racial fetishization.

“[Mascot,] though so far unacknowledged in Webster’s Unabridged, is in popular use, and mascots are becoming more numerous every day,” reported the Utica Observer in July 1886.

“Players of the national game are the most superstitious of men. ‘In their opinion, skill has little to do with the result of a match,’ says one who has studied the matter. ‘A bird flying over the field, the flag blowing in a certain direction, a little boy picked up by one of the nines, a goat or a dog wandering across the diamond while the game is going on—these are the things which include victory to one side or the other.'”

As the Utica Observer indicated, the trend in the 1880s was to acquire young Black boys to travel with the team and sometimes perform light duties, such as handing out or collecting bats for the players.

The Torontos, one of the city’s first major baseball teams, had Willie Hume,”a very small and very fat coloured boy,” according to the Globe.

Hume’s precise age and origins are unclear. The Globe reported he was “picked up” when the team passed through Syracuse en route to an International League game against Rochester, and he first appeared on the bench during a game against Buffalo during the 1886 season.