It appears that my beloved baseball team, the Cleveland Indians, is seriously considering a name change.
While many thought the only problem with the team’s image was the ignobly grinning Chief Wahoo, others insisted the name itself is racist, even if not intentionally derogatory (in fact, it is purported to have been adulatory).
The momentum achieved by Black Lives Matter has spilled over into other areas of public life that have managed to escape change (e.g., the local football club, the Washington Redskins, is also—it says—looking at changing its name). This may finally be the moment to redress these persistent sore points in what should be a commonly enjoyed pastime, free from the stresses and slights of everyday life.
With that I endorse the nascent movement encouraging the Cleveland franchise to resurrect a name it used more than a century ago: the Cleveland Spiders. This was the team’s name when the fabled Penobscot Indian Louis Sockalexis thrilled Clevelanders with his dazzling play. It is said the team later became officially known as the Indians because of his association with it. Be that as it may, times have changed, and one does not have to be an Indian to feel that the name is insensitive.
If the popularity of Cleveland Spiders T-shirts in online stores, before serious talk of renaming arose, is any indication, the name change may actually be welcomed by a large portion of the fan base. Will it be universally liked? No. What is? “Cleveland Indians” certainly is not, yet it has managed to persist. Will it be sufficiently liked? I think it would be.
Someone (I wish I could credit them by name) has nicely incorporated the current Cleveland logo (the “block C”) into a Spiders logo. And to replace the century of affectionately referring to the team as “the Tribe,” we can call them the Racks, short for arachnids, with an echo of “Cleveland Rocks.”
The Cleveland Spiders. Catch the Yankees and the Red Sox in your beautifully engineered web. Race around the bases on your crazy eight legs. Be proud of your place in the ecosystem and in the moral universe.
You can do it, Cleveland. You will not be destroying history—you will be making it.
If, however, Cleveland insists on naming its team after an ethnic group, let it be the Cleveland Slovenians, in honor of the fact that the city has been home to the largest population of Slovenians outside of Slovenia.
As if to show how defective minds think alike, a brother has facetiously suggested (without having read this post) that the team be renamed the Cleveland Kosars. (Bernie Kosar is of Slovenian extraction.*) It just so happens Cleveland has a history of naming teams after people: for a while the baseball team was called the Naps (after their star player Napoleon (“Nap”) Lajoie, and the Browns are named after their great head coach Paul Brown).**
Unfortunately, Tommy: wrong sport! But, nice try.
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*Wikipedia says Kosar is of Hungarian extraction. Need we point out that Wikipedia, a fine starting point in researching a topic, is not always right. I could find exactly one instance of that assertion online, in a very out-of-the-way place. No source is cited there. Kosar himself says nothing of his heritage in his book Learning to Scramble. Circumstantial evidence, however, seems to point to his being Slovenian (the Slovenian version of his name is Košar). For instance, this, from Senator Rob Portman’s encomium of George Voinovich (a certifiable half-Slovenian): “Legendary Quarterback Bernie Kosar tells us the story that [Voinovich] prayed the rosary with Bernie’s mom at the stadium during the 1986 double overtime comeback playoff victory over the New York Jets. Everybody gives Bernie Kosar all the credit for that. It really is George Voinovich and a higher power that intervened.” A Google search of “kosar slovenija” turns up a boatload of Slovenians with that surname. And, of course, Northeast Ohio is crawling with Slovenians. (Western Pennsylvania has its share of Slovenians as well.) Bernie was born in Youngstown. Finally, it is family lore that Bernie is, indeed, Slovenian. Hey, would my mom lie?
**It just so happens Brown is a color, and there is also a history of naming teams after colors: the Blues (of Cleveland and elsewhere), the Maroons (of the University of Chicago), etc., including the Browns (of St. Louis).
Belated addendum: due diligence was not in play when I posted this. The actual, historical Cleveland Spiders own the title of the losing-est professional baseball club in history. They went 20-134 in 1899. Their 101 road losses will stand as a record for all time (MLB teams currently play a maximum of 81 games away from home). It’s no wonder the owners of the Cleveland club took a hard pass on Spiders.
To wrap this up: “Cleveland Guardians” was a pretty good choice for the new name. It sort of rhymes with Indians (which I still slip up and say once in a while); it would be hard to take umbrage at it; and the imagery borrowed from the Lorain-Carnegie bridge is a nice touch (the sculpted figures there being the “Guardians of Traffic”).