A couple of fans at the San Franscisco Giants game had a live bunny at the game. The San Francisco Therapy Bunny is awesome. From ESPN:
Alex [the bunny] has been an important, beloved companion for the 32-year-old Kato, who lost her brewery restaurant called “K-OZ” during the pandemic and now runs a small café in the U.S. Immigration office. The bunny helps her deal with the anxiety and stress of no longer having her main source of income and fulfillment.
“I lost it all because of COVID, so I’ve been really stressed a lot,” Kato said. “We support local. I was a local. He’s well trained, too.”
We could all use a lovable bunny like this. More bunnies please. Such perfect timing for a bunny to attend a game. With less people in the stands, you can do fun things like this.
Therapy bunny on a baseball card?
Maybe this bunny will get featured on a Topps Now card. (Every day Topps announces several new cards with the biggest events of the day. Topps prints only the amount of cards that are pre-ordered for 24 hours.) At the very least, maybe the bunny will get on a digital card in the Topps Bunt mobile app.
7 real-life animals of the MLB
I’d like to see a list of all the real-life animals of the MLB. Here’s what I have so far (sorted chronologically):
- Billy Goat: 1945 Cubs (the one Cubs fans are glad to forget)
- Black cat: 1969 Cubs/Mets (another one for the Cubbies to forget)
- Randy Johnson bird: 2001 Diamondback (technically, when this bird appeared, it immediately ceased to exist)
- Rally Monkey: 2000-2002 Angels
- Gnats: 2007 Yankees (can we consider gnats to be an animal?)
- Rally Squirrel: 2011 Phillies/Cardinals (probably the most beloved animal of this list. The Therapy Bunny might make a the Rally Squirrel run for it’s money)
- Rally Cat: 2017 Cardinals (Thank you, Doug!)
- Therapy Bunny: 2021 Giants
If you know of any more please comment on this blog post, or reply to this tweet.
Popularity of MLB animals
Let’s take each of MLB animals, and see how popular each one is online. We’ll search on Google, eBay, and Google videos. (I would prefer YouTube results, but their search results don’t include a count)
| Search terms | Google results | eBay results | Google videos |
| Billy Goat, Cubs | 204,000 | 29 | 6,390 |
| Black Cat, Cubs | 1,250,000 | 10 | 13,800 |
| Randy Johnson, Bird | 180,000 | 1 | 16,200 |
| Rally Monkey, Angles | 23,700 | 338 | 1,350 |
| Gnats, Yankees | 265,000 | 0 | 1,870 |
| Rally Squirrel, Cardinals | 15,700 | 44 | 1,020 |
| Rally Cat, Cardinals | 4,500 | 2 | 738 |
| Therapy Bunny, Giants | 61 | 0 | 13,500 |
Most popular MLB animal on Google
The 1969 Black Cat rules the Google results. Nothing even comes close. #2 in Google results is surprisingly the Yankee Gnats. However, Yankees Gnats are two terms are fairly vague. The third most popular is the ever-present Billy Goat for the Cubs. Thankfully, this silly “curse” been quieted since the Cubs won the World Series in 2016.
Most popular MLB animal on eBay
Putting the animal online for Google to find is pretty easy. eBay serves as a better judge for the popularity of these MLB animals. To exist on eBay it’s got to:
- Have a product
- Be a sellable product
- Be widespread enough of a product for there to be enough people to sell it (and want it).
The Angels’ Rally Monkey takes the cake on eBay. The Rally Monkey was constantly promoted by the Angels in 2000 to 2002. Everyone was Rally Monkey crazy. Now it’s had 20 years to brew. The rally monkeys are moving from people’s homes and onto eBay.
Most popular MLB animal on video
Randy Johnson’s pitch exploding the bird has the most results. This animal is purely exists in video form. So fascinating how the hardest thrower in baseball just so happened to hit a bird—and gets completely disintegrated by Johnson’s fastball. This video is meant to go viral.
Even though the bird no longer exists, there is one eBay result. Baseball artist J. Sheehan made a two-card ACEO set memorializing this event.
