Let's be honest: If he didn't have a frat bro's name, the Buck's mascot would propably have topped this thing for last week's back-flip dunk off a really, really high ladder.
But as it is, a free agent chicken "won" Forbes' super-scientific poll to determine America's favorite mascots, and our very own Billy the Marlin ranked no. 8.
No offense to Billy, who is a pretty great mascot, but isn't that a little strange? Most of our countrymen probably couldn't identify where the Marlins play, name a single player on the team, or even say what kind of fish Billy is, and yet they loved him.
Maybe it's because he's food, and America is fat.
But whatever his Je ne sais qua, even Forbes couldn't say: they found he had an appeal ranking of 71.5%, but the best they came up with to explain this was "he even made it to Chicago for a relocated home game after Hurricane Ivan knocked the team out of its stadium in 2004."
Clearly they failed to catch in Billy's bio that he is "an abolute master of pantomime."
But hooray for Billy, who isn't even Miami's best mascot. That honor belongs to Sebastian the Ibis, who was been roughed up by cops for trying to put out Florida State's flaming spear with a fire extinguisher, took a bullet to the head from an AK-47 in New Orleans and still performed the next day at the Sugar Bowl, and sports eyebrows that would scream "I'll shoot you!" if he wasn't carrying a gun to do that for them.
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Maybe next year, bird. Maybe next year. And at least neither of them are notorious for moonwalking off a dugout:
Janie Campbell is a Florida native who believes in the pro-set and ballpark hot dogs. Her work has appeared in irreverent sports sites around the internet.
