Once that was settled

Well, they mostly gave their approval. The team wasn't permitted to play as the Syracuse Brannock Devices, because that's a commercial trademark and would violate MiLB's rules against advertising on a uniform. After considering a few options ("Syracuse Foot Measurers didn't have much of a ring to it," says Smorol), the team decided to Buy MLB18 Stubs go with the Syracuse Devices.

Once that was settled, Smorol's small in-house staff had to kick into action. The first task was to create a logo and mascot character -- something that could literally serve as the face of the promotion. That job fell to Danny Tripodi, the team's manager of social media and graphics (who, like almost everyone interviewed for this story, did not know the proper name for a Brannock Device until he began working on this project).

"Jason pretty much told me, 'Here's the Brannock Device -- make it into a mascot character,'" says Tripodi. "And I thought, how am I going to do that?" After working on some preliminary sketches, Tripodi eventually came up with a sort of grouchy-looking anthropomorphized Brannock Device and named him Chuck, after the device's inventor, Charles Brannock.