On April 28, 2012, Edwin Encarnación smacked a grand slam against Mariners pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma. Then something important happened.
According to former Blue Jays slugger José Bautista, Encarnación wasn’t sure if his line drive would clear the wall, so he chugged around first base and almost fell. This momentary loss of balance, Bautista argued, caused Encarnación to run with his arm raised at a strange 90-degree angle, which he left up as he circled the bases. “Everybody was like, ‘That looked cool. You need to do it again,’” Bautista said on MLB Network.
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Encarnación’s version differs slightly. “I was so excited, I started running to the side,” he said. “My teammates saw this and asked me after, ‘Do you know how you ran the bases?’ I said I didn’t. They told me to go watch the video. I went inside the video room and watched the replay and saw my arm like that. They told me that I looked good and to keep doing it every time I hit a home run.”
What’s undeniable is that the seeds of something truly wonderful were planted that day. For the first time in his long, winding baseball career, Encarnación created the perch for his parrot.
His parrot?
Yes, his parrot.
Just look at that! A beautiful work of art, a stroke of modern ingenuity, a flawless creation.
Who could have possibly thought of something so brilliant?
That story starts almost exactly a year to the day after Encarnación’s bomb off Iwakuma.
On April 30, 2013, a Blue Jays blogger named Andrew Zuber and his friend, Will van Roosendaal, went to a Blue Jays-Red Sox game. “Partially just to give John Farrell shit for leaving us,” van Roosendaal explained. Encarnación homered twice that day, and both times circled the bases with his arm up, as had become his custom.
This is where the story gets a little murky.
According to van Roosendaal, his mom had watched the local news and heard a sportscaster say that Encarnación looked like a pirate holding a parrot. Marg van Roosendaal thought that was pretty clever. “And I picked it up from her because I thought that it was really hilarious,” Will van Roosendaal said “I was like, ‘Wow, my mother’s actually funny for a change.’”
He remembers telling Zuber about the parrot in a group message. Zuber remembers hearing it from Marg in the car ride home.
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Either way, Zuber was inspired.
“So when I went home, I wrote my recap and said, ‘Edwin took the parrot for a walk twice,’” Zuber said. “In just word form, it’s not that funny.”
But he knew his friend Scott Johnson created GIFs for theScore. Zuber messaged him.
Johnson says it took him all of 10 minutes to make.
For the first time, Encarnación officially walked the parrot.
Encarnación kept mashing, and the GIF spread deep into the baseball world, so Zuber and Johnson decided they would make shirts with Encarnación, his right arm and the parrot. They soon ran into a problem.
“We didn’t know anything about design and copyright and such,” Johnson said. “The design that we made said Toronto Blue Jays on his jersey, which is obviously frowned upon. So they sent us a cease and desist.”
Zuber and Johnson removed “Blue Jays” from the shirt and kept on selling them. The shirts became a cult classic in Toronto, and Zuber, Johnson and their third partner, The Athletic’s Andrew Stoeten, split about $5,000 between them.
Johnson used his cut to help put a down payment on a house. Zuber used his for a home improvement.
“With those shirts, he got a royalty check from them, which I never saw a dime of, and used it to buy himself a foosball table, which I helped him get into his apartment,” Will van Roosendaal said. “Two days after buying it, he immediately regretted that decision.”
Why?
“The table itself took up roughly half the apartment. He got rid of it as quickly as he possibly could.”
Then the whole thing got messy.
According to Johnson, on May 29, 2014, a fan showed off the parrot shirt on TV during a game. In June, MLB sent another cease-and-desist letter. In July, the Blue Jays started the #WalkTheParrot hashtag, unveiled a shirt with a parrot and Encarnación’s No. 10 on it and played the original GIF on the jumbotron.
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“They just took it from us,” Johnson said.
Today, Zuber and Johnson just laugh about the whole ridiculous situation. But the parrot lives on.
During the Mariners’ home opener, Encarnación, now in his first year in Seattle, crushed a solo homer into The ‘Pen at T-Mobile Park. As he circled the bases, ESPN play-by-play man Matt Vasgersian had the perfect call dialed up:
“The parrot gets a ride in the Northwest for the first time.”
(Top photo: Billie Weiss / Getty Images)
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