On the Cleveland Guardians and Showing Some Care
The nickname may raise some questions if you're not from Cleveland, the process of selecting that name seemed sound.
On first glance, I’m not a huge fan of the rebranding of the Cleveland baseball team to the Guardians. “Guardians” sounds like such a passive name for a sports team. Never mind that one of the most popular subfranchises within the Marvel Cinematic Universe is called “Guardians of the Galaxy.” It works for a comic team more than a baseball team. I had my own ideas, sure, and at least they didn’t drag their feet for a second year like the Washington Football Team or go with an older option under which they set initial records for futility, like the Spiders. The fact that the former nickname is gone is a good thing, but “Guardians” is going to take some getting used to for me.
That being said, I am not a Cleveland native. I’ve been there for a long weekend to visit the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame with my wife for an anniversary some years back, but I’m a Philly guy my whole life. We here in the Delaware Valley have some teams with great nicknames like the Eagles and Flyers and some, like the Phillies and Seventy-Sixers, that if introduced today would probably have taken some getting used to. The “great” nicknames are also kinda generic, ones that could go with any team in any sport in any city. In turn, how great can the name “Philadelphia Eagles” be if a team from Boston or Waukegan or Rabat could also call themselves “The Eagles?”
Sometimes, a great name doesn’t have to be great to everyone to resonate with the right people. Again, staying in Philadelphia, you have the Seventy-Sixers. The name is a direct reference to the year, or at least the last two digits of that year, the Second Continental Congress declared to the United Kingdom that the colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America declared their independence. That Congress took place in Philadelphia. “Seventy-Sixers” might sound like a corny name without any context, but once you add in the connotations to American history locally, it’s hard not to think that it fits a team playing in this city like a tailor-made glove.
Thus, Guardians isn’t meant to be a name that conjures great mass appeal everywhere. It is a nickname that is intensely local to Cleveland. The connection lies on the Hope Memorial Bridge. The span crossing the Cuyahoga River has four spires, each with a larger-than-life, godlike humanoid holding a wagon. They’re called “The Guardians of Traffic.” Therefore, it really shouldn’t matter if I, a Philadelphian for life, don’t “get” the nickname. There are thousands, maybe millions of Cleveland residents and expats who are over the moon about this name. That’s what is important.
A wide search for a universally adaptable and appealing name would’ve just reeked of a weak, corporate mentality that looked to mine as much money from people who may not even exist. Campaigns in that vein end up creating things that leave people questioning “who is this for?” like the cameos of the rapists from A Clockwork Orange in Space Jam 2, or the entirety of WWE’s attempts at mainstream crossovers since 2002 outside of a few successful ones like Bad Bunny or the Muppets. Trying to cast as wide a net as possible without any focus catches no fish, especially when you reside in a sport that is just starting to figure out how to navigate the modern world.
After a century of donning a culturally insensitive nickname with a racist caricature as a logo for a good chunk of that time, you’re not going to want to come up with something hollow and corporate, especially not for a franchise that otherwise is one of the most feelgood teams in the league if it didn’t have such ugly trappings for so long. In fact, the Cleveland team has something to hang its hat upon with respect to race relations. They were the first team that broke the color barrier in the American League by signing Larry Doby. That action doesn’t cancel out the name stuff, but nothing in life is zero-sum anyway.
On top of all that, the team was the subject of one of the best, if not the best, movie about baseball in Major League. A few years after that, they were one of the best team in the American League with a fun roster that included Jim Thome, Kenny Lofton, Sandy Alomar, and Manny Ramirez. They won two pennants, although they lost in both World Series in which they played. They would’ve been so easy to root for as a non-Clevelander had they not had such offensive branding, but even then, people still flocked to them either in spite of the branding or with no care to it.
And yes, there was always going to be backlash against this branding, but when you see some of the people perpetrating it, people you know like Ted Cruz and others who might have pre-formed yesterday to react to outrage like something named “Rich Lowry,” you know it’s mostly grist for the right’s culture war against anything that might challenge their narrow worldview, even if it’s a minor challenge like the branding of a Major League Baseball team. You know Cruz doesn’t watch baseball. Someone like Lowry might, but it’s clear his priorities don’t care about the game if he’s choosing this hill to die upon.
Instead, one should focus on how the team showed care enough to make a decision that reached out to their home base, the local fans who go to the ballparks, wear team apparel, and spend money on cable packages in order to watch every game. It’s not worthy of ebullient praise because it should’ve been done a long time ago. That being said, the way that it was done showed a modicum of care that you usually don’t see with decisions made by teams in any sports league. Hell, look at the Washington Football Team. Every time you see a bit of news come out about their name change, it’s about how the name they want has problems with a trademark or some other legal hurdle. Then again, Daniel Snyder, the team’s owner, has shown that there’s no skinflint path he’s not willing to take.
The Guardians management team, however, showed a little effort, and that little effort has already gone a long way. It might seem weird to an outsider like me, but after some reflection and knowledge about the history and inspiration of the name, there really was no better option. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be kind, not only to the marginalized people you were ignoring and harming for all those years, but also to the people for whom you serve. Maybe unsurprisingly given that care for people means less profit, it’s refreshing in this age where corporations and capitalist entities just don’t give a shit about anyone normally.