There’s More to the Citi Field Raccoon Story

On Wednesday, the Rocket City Trash Pandas shut out Pensacola, 9-0, in the Southern League. In the Midwest League, the Quad Cities River Bandits eked out a 7-6 win over the Dayton Dragons. And in the big leagues, television cameras captured an enormous raccoon traipsing through the Citi Field seats during the seventh inning of the Mets-Pirates game. It was a good day for raccoons at the ballpark.

The major league raccoon went down one row of seats in center field, then back across the next row up, looking for all the world like it was just searching for its seat. “I’m scared of raccoons,” said SNY broadcaster Ron Darling, stammering slightly. The brief clip makes it look like the Citi Field raccoon was simply out for a late-night stroll, not bothering anybody. It turns out there’s more to the story.

Even before Wednesday night, raccoons have always made me think of Queens. I lived there for 14 years, just a couple miles from Shea Stadium, then Citi Field. For the last few years, I lived on the second floor of a house on Manse Street. Sometimes late at night, I’d see raccoons hurriedly crossing the street. I’d often see them lounging by the trash cans in the driveway. In November, a raccoon literally fell out of the ceiling in the Marine Air Terminal at nearby LaGuardia Airport.

I also think of my friend Mark. He lives on Long Island, and raccoons are always trying to get into his attic. They succeeded once. A raccoon climbed onto the roof, made a tiny hole, then enlarged it until it could fit through. It was still a very small hole. Raccoons look much bigger than they are. “The truth is,” says one raccoon control website, “they’re mostly fluff.” With rare exceptions, if a hole is big enough to fit the raccoon’s head, the raccoon will be able to squeeze its entire body through it. And they specialize in expanding holes with their claws. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary (1954), the word “raccoon” comes from the Algonquin raugroughcun, arocoun, meaning “hand scratcher.”

The raccoon was first spotted in the fourth inning. Well, spotted is the wrong word. It appeared inside the batter’s eye, climbed up to a narrow concrete camera platform, and proceeded to harass an SNY camera operator. The camera operator declined to be named for this story but was on Camera 8 that night. “It was running past him,” said John DeMarsico, who directs SNY’s broadcasts. “Because obviously, he’s looking at the field and the game. He would see something out of the corner of his eye running across his legs behind him.” The camera operator couldn’t look away from his work or let go of his equipment, so he tried to shoo the raccoon away gently with his legs. The raccoon would retreat, climbing up the exposed pipework or ductwork, then return to bother him again. Eventually, he had to get on his headset to report the issue. As told by DeMarsico, the conversation went like this. It’s more fun if you picture it taking place inside mission control during a tense scene from Apollo 13.

CAMERA 8: Hey John, there’s a raccoon up here. And it’s, like, very aggressive. So if the camera goes static for a little while, it’s because I’m running away from a raccoon.

JOHN: Seriously?

CAMERA 8: Yeah.

JOHN: Okay. That’s fine.

This was by no means the first time that a raccoon made an appearance at a ballpark. Citi Field in particular is known for them, so much so that they can make for a handy excuse, but it has plenty of company. Last May in Philadelphia, an MLS game between the Union and New York City FC was delayed while a raccoon led stadium employees on a merry chase all over the field. The clock kept running, which meant that in addition to injury stoppage time, the referee had to add at least two minutes of raccoon time. In August, a raccoon was apprehended in the stands during an Omaha Storm Chasers game. The team quickly christened it their Rally Raccoon. On March 11 of this year, in the second inning of a spring training game between the Tigers and Braves, a raccoon was spotted on the wall above the Atlanta bullpen. If you have five minutes to spend on inadvertent absurdist comedy – the broadcast team spends nearly two minutes describing the raccoon before it actually appears on the screen – I cannot recommend this video highly enough.

Raccoons tend to go wherever humans go, but stadiums hold an obvious attraction for them. They’re always full of food trash, they’re often empty, and they’re too big and too open to raccoon-proof. “There’s a lot of garbage generated at Citi Field,” DeMarsico said. At Citi Field, the television trucks are also parked near the dumpsters, which means that the production crews see the raccoons more often than just about anyone. On a rainy night, this raccoon decided to find a dry spot inside the batter’s eye. No one knows why it was so interested in Camera 8. At one point, one of SNY’s engineers came up to check it out and snap a picture.

In the sixth inning, the raccoon finally took things too far. “Seriously John,” DeMarsico recalled the camera operator saying. “This thing keeps coming back. It’s literally circling around me, around my feet.” Because the platform was extremely narrow, when the raccoon was in the way, the operator couldn’t get to the stairs, the only exit. DeMarsico advised him to lock the camera on the batter’s box and get out of there. The camera operator took his chance and stepped away for a few minutes. While he was away, the raccoon departed the batter’s eye. It’s unclear whether someone else in the batter’s eye may have called in security, which could have flushed the raccoon out, or whether the raccoon just decided it was time to hit the concourse. “Nowhere else for it to go than into the stands,” DeMarisco said. “It was a sparse crowd last night, obviously, with the weather, but you were still able to tell that there was a lot of commotion in the right center field area.”

After the sixth inning ended, the broadcast team went into what DeMarsico called Raccoon Hunt Mode. “Every camera was looking for this raccoon. And we caught a few small glimpses of it, thankfully, with our super slow-mo cameras. And we came out of break with it, and I cued up some scary music.” That’s an important thing to keep in mind. The video is in super slow motion. If you speed it up to something approximating real speed, you’ll notice that the cameras really did catch only a few seconds. You’ll also notice that catching even those few seconds was an impressive feat. The raccoon wasn’t strolling around looking for its seat. It was racing.

“It was big,” DeMarsico said. “It was really big.”

About a month or so ago, another raccoon tried to get into my friend Mark’s attic, presumably because it didn’t know he was a Yankees fan. He was sick and sleeping downstairs on the couch so he wouldn’t get his wife sick too. Then he heard scratching coming from the roof. He tried to scare the raccoon off with a flashlight, but wasn’t sure he succeeded. What he did see was that the raccoon had already made it partway into the attic. Mark’s wife had to talk him out of climbing up there with a ladder at one in the morning. He called a roofer first thing the next morning. The hole got patched again, then covered with aluminum siding. “The raccoon owes me $600,” he said. If he wants to collect, he may have to track it down in Flushing.