MLB Team Names

• Boston Red Sox – What does a colored sock have to do with anything? That’s like calling the Rangers the Blue Hats. Wow, a team named after a portion of their uniform. How… idiotic. That they also spelled “socks” wrong counts against them and that it is a shortened version of the double-whammy stupid and awkward “Red Stockings” just makes it worse.
• New York Mets – The name is short for the official name which is “New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc.” The official name is patently lame and uninspired and the shortened version is therefore nonsensical.
• Philadelphia Phillies – The team was named as an homage to their home city which is passively stupid since everyone knows that the city names are almost always included when referring to a sports team. This is necessary to remove any ambiguity with other sports teams. If I say “The Giants sure suck this year” I could be referring to at least two major sports teams and probably a host of collegiate and amatuer-level teams. If I say, “The San Francisco Giants sure suck this year,” which almost everybody would say in most cases, my meaning is clear. Therefore the homage angle is not well thought out and since there is, to my knowledge, no such actual thing as a “Philly” (note that a female horse who has not yet reached sexual maturity is a Filly and in no way a fitting baseball team name unless your team is populated with young girls who have a strong interest in My Little Pony), that means the name fails on all levels.
• Washington Nationals – Stupid for the same reason as “Yankees” except even more so because no one that I’ve ever heard refers to an actual person as a “National” unless they preface it with a foreign country (such as “Chinese National”) and a team full of “Washington Nationals” when Washington isn’t a country strikes fear in the heart of… no one, really.
• Chicago White Sox – Moronic for the exact same reasons as the Red Sox, all the way down to the unnecessary misspelling.
• Cleveland Indians – The name itself is a little uncomfortable to begin with. Unlike “Braves,” Indians is not only not really the preferred term any longer but an Indian in an of itself shouldn’t necessarily confer any of the attributes a baseball team strives for. Then you throw in the team logo which is a miserable caricature of a Native American somewhat akin to the old cartoons and their exaggerated portrayals of African Americans (which would be absolutely unacceptable in modern times, by the way) and it starts to get really uncomfortable. Then you find out that Cleveland’s team name was originally the Spiders (not altogether a bad name for a baseball team) but they were the first to sign a Native American player in Louis Francis Sockalexis so racist fans began referring to the team—disparagingly—as the Indians. After Sockalexis left the league and eventually passed away, the team name was officially changed as an “homage” which, considering that the name was meant to be insulting in the first place, is questionable at best. At this point, it’s almost as bad as the NFL’s Redskins.
• Cincinnati Reds – The actual name was originally the Cincinnati Red Stockings which automatically moves it down here based on the previous rants regarding the Red and White Sox. Items of clothing don’t make good sports team names, period. But when the Reds joined the National League, they dropped the Stockings and were just the Reds, which is also stupid since colors aren’t better names than clothing items. That Reds is also a derogatory term for communists, it just gets worse. Also? The Reds’ logo is among the worst ever, probably stemming from the fact that their name was ludicrous to begin with.
• Oakland Athletics – The common nickname, “The A’s” is pretty dumb but not nearly as dumb as “Athletics” which generally doesn’t even refer to a person (who ever said, “That guy is an athletic!”) because it’s an adjective. Team names that are adjectives are inherently stupid and even though Athleticism is good from a baseball standpoint, there has to be something that possesses that trait for it to work.
• Los Angeles Dodgers – Originally the team was the Brooklyn Dodgers and were originally known as the Trolley Dodgers which Wikipedia says was “a reference to Brooklyn pedestrians who “dodged” the trollies that ran over the maze of streetcar lines that criss-crossed Brooklyn.” So locally specific but still pretty dumb for a baseball team, but made completely worthless when the team moved to LA where they don’t have trolleys and are just known as the Dodgers which suggest that they typically dodge stuff. Since in baseball dodging anything except a wild pitch will usually result in an out or an error, it’s a dumb name for a dumb team. And yes, I did find glee in putting them here because I am a Giants fan.
• San Diego Padres – Perhaps locally specific for the number of Spanish missionaries who historically populated the area, this takes the Anaheim Angels concept to a whole new level of ridiculousness and is in no way a fitting baseball team name.

I think the end result is that baseball has a lot more really bad names than football.

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