I love little microslices of Americana to show how doomed and cursed we’ve always been, instead of it just being a recent trend. For example, one of the great minor league logos after the rebranding era of the 1990s was the Carolina Mudcats, from Zebulon outside of Raleigh. The logo had a big red C, with a big ol’ fat almost smiling catfish peeking through the hole in the C. It was glorious. Well, that team had been in the Southern League from its move to Zebulon in 1991, until 2011, when it got demoted (so to speak) from Double-A baseball to Single-A in the Carolina League. Earlier this decade, the team said it needed to update the Five County Stadium it played in, which had been specifically built in the early 1990s to get the team to move there from Columbus, Georgia. Minor league teams regularly do a smaller version of major league clubs holding localities hostage, sort of like the monorail episode of the Simpsons, selling them on paying for a baseball stadium that the team struggles mightily to get people to come out for. Well, when Wake County resisted pressure to throw more money at a stadium renovation, nearby the town of Wilson pushed to snatch them away, with a $280 million development built around a $70 million baseball-specific stadium. And as Wilson explored this, the plan had been to market it after the Whirligig Park of Vollis Simpson’s art that has made Wilson a tourist destination. The club was gonna be called the Wilson Whirligigs. Somewhere along the way though, some dork ass branding expert was consulted, and he convinced the team that “whirligigs” made no sense, so the name got switched to Warbirds, due to World War II pilots being trained at a nearby air force base. So the Carolina Mudcats were sacrificed, and we got a tease of having the Wilson Whirligigs, as a small sugar coating to another municipality being fleeced by a minor league baseball team for a for-profit stadium to operate out of, and instead all we got was some corny patriotic bullshit Wilson Warbirds.
But get this, the little slice of Americana’s weirdness goes further than that. Just before the Mudcats moved to Carolina, they played two seasons as the Mudcats in Columbus, Georgia, which is right on the Alabama state line, as one of the earliest minor league clubs to rebrand themselves from the previous era’s names which just adopted that of their major league associate. Before that, the Columbus team had been the Astros from 1970 through 1988, and the Columbus White Sox in 1969. But get this – in 1967 and 1968, the Southern League had dropped from 8 to 6 teams, and Columbus was a return in 1969, because they’d previously been in the Southern League from 1964 through 1966, as a farm club for the Yankees. But since they were in Georgia, they were called the Columbus Confederate Yankees. Officially, the team name was always the Columbus Yankees, but because they feared rural Georgia/Alabama would be haters on such a team name for a local club, they chose to sew Confederate flag patches on the arms of the jerseys. The logo on the hat was the Y like a New York Yankees hate, but with a C for Columbus. The NY on Yankees hats is not for Yankees, but New York, and somewhere along the way, a sportswriter or somebody wrote that the CY was Confederate Yankees. Previous to having the club in Columbus, the Yankees same level farm club had been in Augusta, Georgia, known as the Augusta Yankees, and had the lowest attendance in the Southern League, and that lack of care about going to the games caused the Yankees to cancel the affiliation with Augusta. And in order to not replicate the same level of Southern indifference, around the time of the centennial of the Civil War, and coinciding with the Civil Rights movement happening to a major level in nearby cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, they chose to throw the Confederate flag patch on the jerseys. Attendance was much better than in Augusta. (Perhaps the only name as ironic as "Confederate Yankees" was the Negro League team from Atlanta called the Black Crackers.)
Thus, we get a little slice of long sordid history of America, through the marketing of minor league baseball, from the Columbus “Confederate” Yankees, to the Carolina Mudcats, to the godawful Wilson Warbirds. We can’t have nothin’ nice, and also never have apparently. And you can’t get peanuts, and a box of Cracker Jacks is $4 (last time I checked). Probably $5 this year, because my most local to me minor league team rebranded as some sort of collective of monsters from the graveyard.
But get this, the little slice of Americana’s weirdness goes further than that. Just before the Mudcats moved to Carolina, they played two seasons as the Mudcats in Columbus, Georgia, which is right on the Alabama state line, as one of the earliest minor league clubs to rebrand themselves from the previous era’s names which just adopted that of their major league associate. Before that, the Columbus team had been the Astros from 1970 through 1988, and the Columbus White Sox in 1969. But get this – in 1967 and 1968, the Southern League had dropped from 8 to 6 teams, and Columbus was a return in 1969, because they’d previously been in the Southern League from 1964 through 1966, as a farm club for the Yankees. But since they were in Georgia, they were called the Columbus Confederate Yankees. Officially, the team name was always the Columbus Yankees, but because they feared rural Georgia/Alabama would be haters on such a team name for a local club, they chose to sew Confederate flag patches on the arms of the jerseys. The logo on the hat was the Y like a New York Yankees hate, but with a C for Columbus. The NY on Yankees hats is not for Yankees, but New York, and somewhere along the way, a sportswriter or somebody wrote that the CY was Confederate Yankees. Previous to having the club in Columbus, the Yankees same level farm club had been in Augusta, Georgia, known as the Augusta Yankees, and had the lowest attendance in the Southern League, and that lack of care about going to the games caused the Yankees to cancel the affiliation with Augusta. And in order to not replicate the same level of Southern indifference, around the time of the centennial of the Civil War, and coinciding with the Civil Rights movement happening to a major level in nearby cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, they chose to throw the Confederate flag patch on the jerseys. Attendance was much better than in Augusta. (Perhaps the only name as ironic as "Confederate Yankees" was the Negro League team from Atlanta called the Black Crackers.)
Thus, we get a little slice of long sordid history of America, through the marketing of minor league baseball, from the Columbus “Confederate” Yankees, to the Carolina Mudcats, to the godawful Wilson Warbirds. We can’t have nothin’ nice, and also never have apparently. And you can’t get peanuts, and a box of Cracker Jacks is $4 (last time I checked). Probably $5 this year, because my most local to me minor league team rebranded as some sort of collective of monsters from the graveyard.
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