The Erie Moon Mammoths, a minor league baseball team rebranded by John Oliver and his Last Week Tonight staff, made their debut Saturday to a record-setting crowd that included Oliver in attendance.
Back in May, during a segment about minor league baseball teams and their frequent crowd-drawing promotions, Oliver invited teams to send in proposals about why they deserved a rebrand; nearly 50 teams sent in proposals, with Oliver ultimately opting for the Erie SeaWolves, as that Pennsylvania team and Detroit Tigers affiliate played nowhere near a sea.
“Erie did stand out to us as being, you know, uniquely eccentric. And I say that as both a compliment and an insult, which is the biggest compliment there is,” Oliver said Saturday during a pregame press conference (via The Associated Press) before serving as the game’s bat boy and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” singer.
“There was something about the Moon Mammoth that spoke to us for being particularly odd. It felt like it could make a baseball team’s theme. You could almost see the logo in your head and it felt like something to be extra surprising.”
Just over two months later, the Erie Moon Mammoths — named after George Moon, an Erie man who discovered mammoth bones while scuba diving in nearby Lake Pleasant in 1991 — played their first game Saturday to an attendance of 7,070 people, the largest crowd in UPMC Park’s history.
George Moon was also on hand to catch Oliver’s ceremonial first pitch. “It’s fun. I’m enjoying it,” Moon said. “From all those years ago to today, I would never have thought anything like this would’ve been possible. The newspaper did something on its 30th anniversary [in 2021]. Other than that, I haven’t heard much.”
SeaWolves president Greg Coleman told the AP that, in the three weeks since the Moon Mammoths’ rebrand was announced, the team has sold four years’ worth of merchandise in their online store, and lines formed at the on-site team store.
Despite their popularity, the Moon Mammoths will revert back to the SeaWolves for most games — this is just a minor league promotion, after all — but the Oliver-branded team will play three more times this season, Aug. 19 and Sept. 12 and 13. Moon Mammoths games are also planned for the 2026 season.
“I love minor league baseball. There is a special eccentricity to it,” Oliver said. “It felt like a nice fit with our show because minor league baseball, as you know, is willing to try anything. That was proven by the fact that over half the league was willing to sight unseen, rebrand and put their trust in the hands of a group of people who are objectively untrustworthy. That’s a bad decision, and it’s that kind of bad decision making that I love about minor league baseball.”
