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Barley the Hop, mascot of the Hillsboro Hops Short-Season Class A baseball team.

(Benjamin Brink / The Oregonian)

They were talking about Barley the Hop at Chicago's Wrigley Field on Tuesday night.

With the hometown Cubs putting the finishing touches on a 7-1 pounding of the Milwaukee Brewers, play-by-play TV announcers Len Kasper and Jim "J.D." Deshaies shifted to the minor leagues and the origin story of the green Hillsboro baseball mascot.

At the time, the Boise Hawks, the Cubs' Class-A Short Season affiliate, trailed Hillsboro 4-2 in Game 1 of their best-of-three playoff series.

"It's the Hillsboro Hops," Kasper told viewers in the nation's third-largest media market and people watching the nationwide stream on MLB.TV.

"The Hops. H-O-P-S?" Deshaies asked.

Kasper: "Yes."

Deshaies: "Is that beer country or rabbit country?"

Kasper: "I wonder if they're affiliated with the Brewers."

Then came the confusion.

"I don't even ... know ... what this logo is," Kasper said.

Obviously, he had spotted the Hops' grimacing-cone logo on a computer screen in the Wrigley broadcast booth.

As 34-year-old Cubs closer Kyuji Fujikawa went to work against the Brewers' Mark Reynolds, you could hear Kasper furiously Googling the Hops with a flustered "mmmm-hmmm."

"It looks like a tree or something," he thought out loud. "A pine tree?"

Deshaies: "I got no idea what that guy is. I've got their website pulled up here. Kinda like the Stanford tree."

(About 10 seconds of silence.)

Deshaies: "Affiliated with the Diamondbacks."

Kasper: "Well, we've got to get to the bottom of this. We have to stay here all night."

Deshaies discovered that the team was based in "Yack-ah-ma" and featured a lot of prospects for the Dodgers, including former Cubs' slugger Sammy Sosa, at one point.

Suddenly, Kasper struck gold on Wikipedia: "The team name is in reference to the plant used in beer brewing. Oregon is the second-largest hop-producing U.S. state by volume. Then you've got the bat hop. The throw hop in baseball. ... The logo has a hop cone wearing a baseball hat, evergreen trees and Mt. Hood. ... The mascot's name is Barley."

Fujikawa walked Reynolds and the conversation continued.

Kasper: "I didn't know that about Oregon, the hop producing. We learned something tonight."

That's right, this isn't rabbit country! At least they pronounced Hillsboro and Oregon correctly.

Of course, if they had dug a little further, the Cubs broadcasters would have also discovered that Barley has won MiLB.com's Northwest League Mascot Mania vote for the second consecutive year.

The Brewers dropped their seventh straight game, sliding further behind the NL Central-leading St. Louis Cardinals.

Meanwhile the Hillsboro Hops are one win away from the Northwest League Championship Series after beating the Boise Hawks 5-2 on Tuesday night in Boise.

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-- Joseph Rose