Some possible new names for Cleveland's baseball team
Because I don't feel like talking about anything serious right now
The team currently known as the Cleveland Indians is changing their name! In 2022. But still! Changing their name! After one more long season of using their name, they’re going to change it for moral reasons. After using it more. I see no issues there.
But I come not to bury this decision, but to exploit it for some fun goofs. So I went through some of the popular names being bandied about for Cleveland, added one or two of my own, and decided to rigorously evaluate them for quality.
Cleveland Rockers
Boring.
Cleveland Lake Shores
Lame.
Cleveland River Fires
Too cliched.
Cleveland Grovers
It’s a fun history reference! The biggest problem is they could only use this one in non-consecutive seasons. Or, if your main interest here is selling merchandise, the biggest asset is they could only use this one in non-consecutive seasons.
Cleveland Browns
YOU, A RUBE: But isn’t there already a professional sports team called the Cleveland Browns that plays in Cleveland?
ME, LOOKING VERY SMUG: wait shit they’re decent this year i didn’t think this bit out
Cleveland Spiders
This is a popular one, and I understand that people like the idea of renaming the team after the old Cleveland baseball team, but consider this: That team was an absolute embarrassment and doesn’t deserve to be remembered as anything other than an absolute embarrassment. Did they have some good seasons? Sure! Did they have good players? Again, yes; Cy Young comes to mind.
But did they get rid of all of their good players because the owners bought a team in St Louis, shipped all the talent there because attendance was going to be higher, and didn’t bother fielding a competitive team in Cleveland? Yes. Oh, yes, absolutely. The owners of the team announced that the Spiders were a sideshow, and so over the team’s first 16 home games, they drew less than 200 fans a game. This was such a pathetic attendance figure that opposing teams would lose money staying at a hotel in Cleveland, so the Spiders had to play 112 games on the road out of of their total of 154 games
This is not a legacy worth honoring. Sure, from the owner’s perspective I can see the upside: you can do whatever the hell you want to as long as it makes you money. It’s still a widely held opinion in ownership circles even today! But it’s not a good thing, or something we should want to glorify.
Also, people back in the day hated the name Spiders. Hated it. In case that’s relevant.
Cleveland Blues
I like this, which honors a less nakedly pathetic part of Cleveland’s baseball history — the Spiders before they decided to not try — but I also appreciate the similarity to the darlings of the California Collegiate League, the San Luis Obispo Blues.
It’s, uh, possible that this is not a universally shared positive sentiment that would be widely recognizable among people who did not attend college in San Luis Obispo.
Cleveland Garfields
President James Garfield is buried in Cleveland! That’s the ostensible connection which everyone would rightfully ignore in favor of jokes about how lasagna is good and Mondays are bad.
Cleveland Naps
The team is currently (ostensibly) named after Louis Sockalexis, a Native American who played for the Spiders for three years.
(The team is mostly not named after Sockalexis, as an old Joe Posnanski piece points out. The name was probably partially a way to recapture an exciting time in Cleveland baseball history, when Sockalexis had a dazzling 1897 season, but it was mostly because Native American names were trendy and it was easy and fun and cool at the time to make jokes related to Native Americn heritage.)
Instead of the team (not) being named for someone who never even played for that franchise, why not name it after one of the franchise’s all-time greats? Nap Lajoie, the third man to reach 3,000 major league hits and still possibly the greatest baseball player in Cleveland history, would be a fine choice. The team was actually named after him in his waning days there, so this would still hearken back to old traditions.
Also, naps are great. Have you taken a nap lately? Wasn’t it good? Couldn’t every day be improved by a nap? That’s exactly the kind of energy I’d want to see coming from my baseball team. Cleveland Naps, folks. It’s the wave of the past and also future.