ALTOONA, Pa. — Al Tuna sat alone in a cramped wooden shack tucked behind the center-field wall. It was after sundown on a tepid summer evening, but Al was sweating — a lot. He followed the ballgame on a beat-up radio and plotted his dance moves. He dreaded the postgame stumble up the stadium steps.
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As the innings droned on, Al found himself in deep existential pondering that only a minor-league baseball mascot can truly appreciate.
Am I a tuna … or a goldfish?
I spent nine smelly, exhausting innings inside Al’s bright orange skin during an Altoona Curve game last month, and I still don’t know the answer.
‘A unique species’
The writer, ready for his debut as Al Tuna.The name, of course, is a no-brainer. When the Curve became the Pirates’ Double-A affiliate in 1999, the folks in the marketing department wanted a kid-friendly mascot that was in some way linked to the town.
The Curve are named after Horseshoe Curve, a half-mile stretch of track the Pennsylvania Railroad laid in the Allegheny Mountains more than 170 years ago. Altoona is smack dab in the middle of rural central Pennsylvania; there’s no saltwater for hundreds of miles. Even though “Al Tuna” has no railway connections and is literally a fish out of water, the name was too good (and too obvious) to pass up.
Scollon Mascots is a South Carolina-based company that has produced outfits for the Steelers’ Steely McBeam, Lugnut of Charlotte Motor Speedway and the Curve’s original mascot, Steamer. When team officials decided to create Al Tuna, Scollon sent them a giant fish costume. There was only one problem.
“It clearly looks like a goldfish,” said Mike Kessling, the Curve’s director of marketing and promotions. “Tuna are silvery, Al is gold. We were like, ‘Well, all right, then. We’ll just use this costume.’”
In the minor leagues, you learn to make the best of any situation. Fortunately, nobody seems to mind the discrepancy. “I don’t know what Al is, but that’s OK,” said Pirates rookie Cam Vieaux, who pitched for Altoona in 2019 and 2021. “He’s a unique species to Altoona.”
The result is marketing genius. Al Tuna is the star of every game at 7,210-seat PNG Field, even though he’s out of sight most of the time. Whenever the Curve score a run, Al pops out of a door in the outfield wall and celebrates in center field. If the Curve are losing going into the bottom of the ninth inning, Al is summoned by a scoreboard video to perform a rally dance.
Fans chant, “We want Al” and turn their Curve hats inside out to reveal a set of Al Tuna eyes on the inside lining. The rally caps are so popular, the souvenir stands have trouble keeping them in stock.
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The players were quick to adopt Al, too. They’ve designed their own Al Tuna-themed T-shirts, which are awarded to guys who make clutch plays on the field or who keep everyone loose in the clubhouse.
Before the start of the 2017 Eastern League best-of-five championship series against Trenton, outfielder Jerrick Suiter bragged that he’d get an Al Tuna tattoo if the Curve pulled off a sweep.
“In (Game 3), I was on first base and Jin-De Jhang hit a three-run triple to give us the lead,” Suiter said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, I might actually have to do this.’ We’re popping champagne later in the clubhouse and everyone’s like, ‘Dude, you have to do it!’”
A member of the grounds crew had a buddy who ran a tattoo parlor, and the artist agreed to open his shop after hours to fulfill the special request. As his teammates celebrated their title-clinching triumph, Suiter made a quick trip across town to keep his word.
“I got probably the best tattoo ever: Al giving the ‘No. 1’ finger guns, right there on the left side of my ass,” said Suiter, who has retired from pro ball and lives near Fort Worth, Texas.
“In 30 years, I’m not going to care that I’ve got Al Tuna tattooed on my ass cheek,” Suiter said. “We won a championship. You can’t take that away from us. It was a funny moment, but it was cool.”
Jumping into the suit
The writer (in the Al Tuna costume) and Alexandra Diamond, who usually handles mascot duties, on the field before the game.Hidden behind the concourse on the third-base side of PNG Field is a large storage room. Neon-colored costumes and props hang on the walls. Boxes of giveaway items are stacked in one corner. In the middle of the room is a bare table and a single folding chair.
Welcome to the mascots’ dressing room.
“It’s gonna feel heavy on you before the game,” Trevor Huddleston said as he handed me the Al Tuna gear. “And it’s gonna be even heavier after the game.”
A native of Bowling Green, Ky., Huddleston is one of the Curve’s front-office interns. Last year, he worked for the now-defunct Southern Illinois Miners of the independent Frontier League. The Miners gave Huddleston, 22, his first taste of mascotting.
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“My manager said, ‘Hey, I have a birthday party here. All the mascots are busy, so we need you to jump in the suit,’” Huddleston said. “I was out on the concourse for about 15 minutes before I had to run into a freezer in the concession stand, panting and sweating because of how hot it was.”
As I put on the multiple parts of Al’s costume — a concoction that wasn’t made of any breezy, natural fibers — I began to understand why everyone kept telling me to stay hydrated.
I started by pulling on a pair of fuzzy, gold leggings that stretched from my ankles to my waist. There were a couple of worn-through holes, but they didn’t help much with air circulation. Already, my legs were starting to sweat.
Next was a pair of brown pants, sort of like lederhosen, with a white racing stripe down each side. These were held up by suspenders that had strips of velcro instead of buttons.
I wrestled in vain with the suspenders until Huddleston and I realized they were pre-adjusted for Alexandra Diamond, a 19-year-old intern who portrays Al Tuna during most Curve games. Diamond is 5-foot-4. I’m 6-1. We had to peel off wads of tape to loosen the suspenders.
A furry orange crop top went over my T-shirt. The top should have tucked neatly into the lederhosen, but, alas, I have a bit too much belly to pull that off.
“The mobility is pretty limited,” Huddleston warned me. “The mobility issues you’ll have are going to be around the waist, because there’s big plastic tubing there. It’s kind of like you’ve got a harness on top and it’s pretty much attached to you. You can still move around, but it feels really big, almost like there’s another person you’re controlling.”
There were holes at the ends of the elongated sleeves — designed to resemble fins— to tuck my thumbs through. The finishing touch was a pair of clumsy, four-fingered gloves.
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“The fins don’t wick sweat at all,” Diamond said. “I take them off between innings because I was starting to get blisters.”
The next step was the most challenging: putting on the shoes. Al wears an oversized pair of black-and-red clod-hoppers, but getting my size 11 sneakers inside them was a tight squeeze. No offense to all of the Al Tunas who came before me, who I’m sure are wonderful people, but I was not going to put my bare feet into those things.
After a lot of shoving and grunting, I got my feet in. The shoes were spongy and made it feel like I was walking on the moon. They also provided zero traction — something I’d have to keep in mind later while going up and down steps and cavorting on the crushed stone of the outfield warning track.
It was “go time.” My only line of sight out of the massive headpiece was through Al’s broad smile, a wide but narrow view. I could see straight ahead for a country mile, but hadn’t a clue of what might be going on under my feet.
“Out of all the costumes I’ve been in, Al has the best vision by far,” Kessling said. “People sometimes fall down the stairs, but that happens very rarely.”
That wasn’t very reassuring.
If I took a tumble, I’d have to suffer in silence because Al Tuna doesn’t talk. When fans come up to me for a photo or an autograph, Kessling said I should keep my antics simple and full of slapstick. Goldfish have a three-second memory — just like Dory from “Finding Nemo” — so it wouldn’t be proper to play Al with any level of sophistication.
“Al is kind of … I don’t want to say ‘dumb,’ so let’s say Al is innocent,” Kessling said. “He does things with child-like wonderment. And he’s just as excitable when he pops out of the wall on the first run of the game as he is for the 19th run of the game because it’s new to him every time.”
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As a staff member came over to guide me to the field, Huddleston offered some last-minute advice. “Dance like no one’s watching, even though there’s thousands of people watching you,” he said. “They don’t see the person inside the costume, so what do they know? Go out there and have as much fun with it as you can.”
Inside the Fishbowl
Many of the mascot performers have scribbled messages inside the Fish Bowl. At top right is the slit in the door that allows Al Tuna to watch the action on the field.A Penn State student who lives in Altoona, Diamond took a summer job with the Curve’s game day production group. She wants to work for Disney someday, so glad-handing thousands of people as Al Tuna every night seemed like a good starting point.
“Definitely the best part is having all sorts of fun interactions with the fans and then especially the players,” Diamond said. “All the pitchers chant, ‘Al! Al! Al!’ when I walk by the bullpen. I don’t know what the worst thing is. Maybe that it gets kind of hot and lonely in the Fishbowl.”
The Fishbowl is the makeshift room where Al Tuna hangs out during the game when he’s not on the field dancing. The first thing I saw inside was a can of wasp spray sitting on a ledge.
“They were building (a nest) up in the doorway, but we sprayed it so we’re good now,” Diamond said. “There are groundhogs back here, though. You’ll see their shadow sometimes and be like, what is that?”
The area around the Fishbowl is strewn with rocks and a handful of baseballs that cleared the fence during batting practice. A couple of dozen yards behind that is one of the roller coasters at Lakemont Park, an amusement park that borders the ballpark.
The Fishbowl also housed a small fan, a few bottles of water and a portable radio that was tuned to the game broadcast. When the Curve are at-bat, Al Tuna has to be in full costume, ready to burst out the door when the home team scores.
There were no wasps and no groundhogs in the Fishbowl. Not much breeze, either, unfortunately.In one game in late May, the Curve scored 19 runs. Midway through the marathon nine-run second inning, Al ran out of dance moves. “We just started radioing Al (on a walkie-talkie) and requesting dances,” Kessling said. “Fans got involved. Al and the center fielder really started getting into it, trying to figure out what dance Al was going to do next.”
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My night was not as busy. When the Curve scored a run in the first inning, I fumbled with the door latch — my hands weren’t very nimble in the big, four-fingered fish gloves — ran onto the grass and … just kind of wiggled and flailed my arms.
“One problem with Al is he can’t clap,” Kessling said. “Maybe we’ll fix that the next time we redesign the costume.”
I quickly realized that I was 400 feet away from the fans in the box seats, so my moves had to be really big, exaggerated and simple. When Blake Sabol smacked a two-run homer in the fourth, I did the “Lawnmower.” Later, I tried a little “Saturday Night Fever” disco boogie and the “Walk Like an Egyptian” move from that 1980s Bangles video. Mercifully, Curve broadcasters Jon Mozes and Preston Shoemaker weren’t too critical of my dance moves in this clip.
A FAB(ricio)ulous result for us in the 3rd means more Al Tuna! pic.twitter.com/tZtGw1HPvI
— Altoona Curve (@AltoonaCurve) July 14, 2022
This is very important: Al Tuna must not linger too long on the field. I didn’t want Richmond center fielder Jacob Heyward, the younger brother of Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward, to have to police me, so I always hustled back into the Fishbowl — careful not to smack my huge headpiece against the low doorframe — when I heard Diamond calling that my time was up. Nobody I talked with could recall an instance of a ticked-off opposing player tackling Al Tuna, but …
“I can imagine it gets pretty annoying, your team gives up a home run in the eighth, the fireworks are going off and you’ve got somebody in a fish costume jumping around behind you on the field,” Vieaux said. “I can see how an outfielder would get fed up with that.”
On this night, the Curve beat the Flying Squirrels 8-3, so I didn’t have to do a rally dance in the ninth inning. After the game, Diamond hustled me back to the dressing room — it was much less dangerous going up the stairs than it was coming down. I posed for some photos with kids, then retreated to the back room to peel off my costume.
Before I left the ballpark, Kessling shook my hand and laughed. This is his eighth season with the Curve and, like every minor-league employee, he’s filled a million roles — including donning the fish suit every now and again.
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“We scored a lot of runs and I didn’t hear one fan question what was wrong with Al,” Kessling said. “People were genuinely excited to see Al come out, which means you passed the test of, like, not looking like a noob. You upheld the high standard of Al Tuna’s dance moves, so you can come back any time and help out with Al.”
Thanks, but from now on I think I’ll stick to my spot in the air-conditioned press box.
(Photos by Claire Biertempfel)
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