In the summer of 1991, a scuba diver named George Moon was combing the depths of Lake Pleasant in Erie County, Pa. When he broke the surface, he was carrying with him an almost three-foot long bone. Moon had no idea then that what he’d stumbled across was the shoulder blade of a creature that had walked the land in Erie something like 12 millennia ago. He also had no idea that this prehistoric discovery would one day somehow become a part of baseball history.
It turned out what Moon had found was just a small part of a very large mammoth, and on further dives that Moon and others made into that part of Lake Pleasant, about 80 percent of the massive mammal’s remains were found, including both its tusks. It became known locally in Erie as the Moon Mammoth and now, more than three decades later, thanks to “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver and his team of writers, this story is getting dug up again as a brand new alternate identity for the Erie SeaWolves, Double-A affiliate of the Tigers.
Make no bones about it, while the tale of the Moon Mammoth is a folkloric one in Erie, it isn’t exactly common knowledge. Ask any resident if they’ve tasted a pepperoni ball, a local delicacy that inspired another of the team’s alternate identities, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t had one melt in their mouth. But the Moon Mammoth? Both SeaWolves team president Greg Coleman and assistant GM Greg Gania, who have been Erie residents for going on 20 years, had never heard the story until the show brought it to them. It’s more of a deep cut, about as deep as Moon had to go to find those bones, and exactly the type of obscure lore that Oliver and his crew set out to find when they took on the project of giving one Minor League team a rebrand.
“I think we could have got with our staff in a room and come up with 50 different identities that all would have been very successful and good and well-received,” Coleman told MLB.com. “And we wouldn’t have ended up here.”
So how did we end up here, with an enormous purple mammoth in an astronaut’s helmet and moon-walking boots being unveiled as purple confetti streamed down onto a makeshift baseball field at the end of Sunday night’s episode of “Last Week Tonight”? It all started in early May, when Oliver put out a call to Minor League Baseball teams: Let us give your team a refresh. There was one catch. The show would have full autonomy to come up with an idea, and the team would be left completely in the dark. That didn’t exactly scare Coleman, who put together an 11-point note to send to the show explaining why the SeaWolves were a good fit. They were one of more than 40 Minor League teams to submit, and Coleman believed they had a good shot to be picked.
One reason for that was the team’s 2017 “Alternative Facts Night,” when the SeaWolves celebrated a championship they never won, against the very team that had won it the prior year.
“Clearly we have a sense of humor, and we’re also not afraid to go to a place that’s right up to the edge a little bit,” Coleman said. “We’re a team that will take a look and say, ‘Is this still in good fun, is the spirit of this right, can we tell a story that is fair and balanced?’ And we felt we did that.”
Coleman figured this would make an impact on an unflinching show like Oliver’s. And even though his teenage daughter Maggie was a bit skeptical her dad could write a letter that would sway the show, as teenage daughters sometimes are, he ended up being right. When Oliver announced the SeaWolves had been picked live during an episode a month ago, Coleman woke up his daughter from her sleep for the requisite good-natured “I told you so.”
From there it was all in the hands of the show to come up with an idea. Oliver said they were trying to remain true to the “inherent eccentricity” of Minor League Baseball throughout the process, and when they came up with the Moon Mammoths he was “about as happy as I get as a human being.”
To get a picture of the Moon Mammoth in your head, think Snuffleupagus if he were purple with white tusks, could stand on his own two feet and had gotten a serious sudden injection of energy. Oliver got the all-important seal of approval from his own kids when he showed them the prototype for the mascot, whose full name is Fuzz E. Mammoth. Though Oliver joked that considering his kids already have an inaccurate sense of what he does for a living, they might now believe he works for some form of “Sesame Street.”
“Technically, I don’t,” Oliver said.
The man behind the mask for Fuzz’s unveiling was the show’s master of puppeteering, Noel MacNeal, who is no stranger to embodying an oversized fuzzy animal. He is best known for playing the titular role in “Bear in the Big Blue House” (that means he was the bear, not the house). About an hour before he was set to debut as the Moon Mammoth, MacNeal was sitting in costume, sans mask, eyes closed with a mini fan helping him stay cool.
But now the ever-important mascot job will be passed on to the SeaWolves staff. After getting a few final touchups, Fuzz’s getup will make its way about 450 miles northwest from the “Last Week Tonight” studio to Erie – which Gania described as “the chimney of Pennsylvania” – for the team’s debut game as the Moon Mammoths on July 19. Oliver is expected to be in attendance, and George Moon, who still calls Erie home, has been invited as a special guest.
Fuzz might take some getting used to for diehard Erie fans who are so accustomed to the more slender SeaWolf. But Coleman is confident they’ll come to embrace this 12,000-year-old creature, who rose from the depths of a local lake to resurface a story that is ingrained in Erie’s history, and prehistory.
“We’re one of the smallest markets in all of baseball … so we have to fight for everything we do,” said Gania, who also does play-by-play broadcasts for the SeaWolves and for the big league club. “It’s our job to help put Erie on the map, and this shines such a big light on a small community.”