The Universe of Discourse

Baseball team nicknames, again
Some addenda to my recent article about baseball team nicknames.

Several people wrote to complain that I mismatched the cities and the nicknames in this sentence:

The American League [has] the Boston Royals, the Kansas City Tigers, the Detroit Indians, the Oakland Orioles...

My apologies for the error. It should have been the Boston Tigers, the Kansas City Indians, the Detroit Orioles, and the Oakland Royals.

Phil Varner reminded me that the Chicago Bulls are in fact a "local color" name; they are named in honor of the Chicago stockyards.

This raises a larger point, brought up by Dave Vasilevsky: My classification of names into two categories conflates some issues. Some names are purely generic, like the Boston Red Sox, and can be transplanted anywhere. Other names are immovable, like the Philadelphia Phillies. In between, we have a category of names, like the Bulls, which, although easily transportable, are in fact local references.

The Milwaukee Brewers are a good baseball example. The Brewers were named in honor of the local German culture and after Milwaukee's renown as a world center of brewing. Nobody would deny that this is a "local color" type name. But the fact remains that many cities have breweries, and the name "Brewers" would work well in many places. The Philadelphia Brewers wouldn't be a silly name, for example. The only place in the U.S. that I can think of offhand that fails as a home for the Brewers is Utah; the Utah Brewers would be a bad joke. (This brings us full circle to the observation about the Utah Jazz that inspired the original article.)

The Baltimore Orioles are another example. I cited them as an example of a generic and easily transportable name. But the Baltimore Oriole is in fact a "local color" type name; the Baltimore Oriole is named after Lord Baltimore, and is the state bird of Maryland. (Thanks again to Dave Vasilevsky and to Phil Gregory for pointing this out.)

Or consider the Seattle Mariners. The name is supposed to suggest the great port of Seattle, and was apparently chosen for that reason. (I have confirmed that the earlier Seattle team, the Seattle Pilots, was so-called for the same reason.) But the name is transportable to many other places: it's easy to imagine alternate universes with the New York Mariners, the Brooklyn Mariners, the San Francisco Mariners, or the Boston Mariners. Or even all five.

And similarly, although in the previous article I classed the New York Yankees with the "local color" names, based on the absurdity of the Selma or the Charleston Yankees, the truth is that the Boston Yankees only sounds strange because it didn't actually happen that way.

I thought about getting into a tremendous cross-check of all 870 name-city combinations, but decided it was too much work. Then I thought about just classing the names into three groups, and decided that the issue is too complex to do that. For example, consider the Florida Marlins. Local color, certainly. But immovable? Well, almost. The Toronto Marlins or the Kansas City Marlins would be jokes, but the Tampa Bay Marlins certainly wouldn't be. And how far afield should I look? I want to class the Braves as completely generic, but consideration of the well-known class AA Bavarian League Munich Braves makes it clear that "Braves" is not completely generic.

So in ranking by genericity, I think I'd separate the names into the following tiers:

1. Pirates, Cubs, Reds, Cardinals, Giants, Red Sox, Blue Jays, White Sox, Tigers, Royals, Athletics
2. Braves, Mets, Dodgers, Orioles, Yankees, Indians, Angels, Mariners, Nationals, Brewers
3. Marlins, Astros, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Padres, Devil Rays, Twins
4. Phillies, Rangers

Readers shouldn't take this classification as an endorsement of the Phillies' nickname, which I think is silly. I would have preferred the Philadelphia Brewers. Or even the Philadelphia Cheese Steaks. Maybe they didn't need the extra fat, but wouldn't it have been great if the 1993 Phillies had been the 1993 Cheese Steaks instead? Doesn't John Kruk belong on a team called the Cheese Steaks?

Another oddity, although not from baseball: In a certain sense, the Montreal Canadiens have an extremely generic name. And yet it's clearly not generic at all!

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