T.C. Bear
is the mascot for the Minnesota Twins
T.C. Bear, or simply T.C., is the costumed character mascot for the Minnesota Twins. Taking the form of an anthropomorphized American black bear, the furry mascot’s initials "T.C." stand for the Twin Cities—the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and Saint Paul—and match the interlocking letters on the team's primary cap insignia. T.C. makes appearances at the team’s home games at Target Field and at community events.
History
The Minnesota Twins franchise of Major League Baseball briefly had a mascot from 1980 to 1981, a loon named "Twinkie". T.C. Bear was first introduced to the team's fans on April 3, 2000, at the beginning of the Twin's 2000 season. The mascot character is loosely modeled after the Hamm's Beer Bear, a mascot used in advertisements for Hamm's Brewery, an early sponsor for the Twins. The bear character was also chosen for its appeal to children.
The original person who portrayed T.C. Bear, Greg Wilfahrt, was fired after the 2019 season. For the 2021 Major League Baseball season, two new actors (who were said to play T.C. the year before but only made minor appearances due to the COVID-19 pandemic not allowing fans inside the stadium) started portraying him full time and his mouth slightly changed and his tongue is less visible.
Legacy
The team installed a statue in 2014 of T.C. outside of Target Field where the team plays.
The public source identifies “T.C. Bear” as is the mascot for the Minnesota Twins. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bear, mascot and Minnesota.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q111181157. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1981, 2000 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “T.C. Bear” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.