Phillies-Padres: Who wants a chicken cheesesteak?

As the Phillies and Padres get ready for three games at Citizens Bank Park, the Phillie Phanatic is still trying to shrug off a controversy he was involved in 2,700 miles away.

Ahead of Game 1 of the National League Championship Series on Tuesday, a local company called Ground Floor Murals painted a mural on the side of a San Diego restaurant meant to rally Padres fans. It featured a colorless Phanatic being stomped to the ground by the San Diego Chicken, the city’s beloved mascot for its only remaining major professional sports team.

Well, technically the chicken is the team’s unofficial mascot. It’s real mascot is the Swinging Friar, taken from the team’s first logo and the inspiration for the Padres’ name, which is Spanish for “fathers” or “friars” and a tribute to the Franciscan Friars who founded the first Spanish colony in southern California.

Anyway, superstitious Padres fans didn’t really like the mural over fears it might jinx the team during the series. So it was painted over less than a day after it was first painted.

“We wanted it to stay up, the building owner wanted it to stay up, the people who commissioned it wanted it to stay up, but someone else made the final call,” Paul Jimenez of Ground Floor Murals told NPR-affiliate KPBS. “Nowadays Twitter will reign supreme and if you can’t take the comments, you have to do what you have to do to save face.”

I doubt Phillies fans will share the same apprehension about the Phanatic, say, getting a bit of revenge by making a chicken cheesesteak ahead of this weekend’s games. It’s harder to make fun of the Swinging Friar, but some in town have given it a try.