lol’d heartily: the High-A affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, the Rome Braves announce rebranding of the team starting in 2024; reaching out to the pleebs for suggestions for the new team name
When I learned that the Braves along with a few other franchises, were selling their minor league affiliates, I knew that this was going to eventually happen. The Braves, as well as the Yankees, Cardinals and Cubs off the top of my head, maybe a few others, were some of the only teams that owned one or more of their minor league affiliates.
As a result, these teams would often times be generically branded as the Springfield Cardinals, Staten Island Yankees, Iowa Cubs, and in the case of the Braves, the Gwinnett Braves, Richmond Braves, Macon Braves, Mississippi Braves, Danville Braves and so forth. In fact, the Braves were probably the worst team at brand suffocation; at one point, they basically had the rights to nearly their entire minor league pipeline, branding them all “the Braves.”
None of these teams got to be quirky, have fun names, and the freedom to brand, market and advertise, because of stuffy corporate brand standards. And for every minor league team that was owned by their parent organizations, there would be five other teams with fun, local, unique, memorable or all of the above names and identities, that paired up with all the same, to an MLB organization.
The Montgomery Biscuits, Modesto Nuts, Myrtle Beach Pelicans, Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, and the Asheville Tourists come to mind off the top of my head. All unique, quirky and interestingly branded organizations with contractual obligations to be minor league affiliates of MLB squads. I’ve also been to the homes of all the aforementioned minor league teams, and let me tell you how much more fun minor league baseball is compared to the too-serious, pain-in-the-ass experience of big league Major League Baseball.
Well, now that the Atlanta Braves don’t have the right to lord over the Rome Braves anymore, it comes as no surprise that the newly anointed Rome Professional Baseball Club has decided to ditch the Braves name and come up with something new, fresh, and hopefully a lot more fun than a name that every so often gets brought up as whyyyy do they still have such an offensive name to indigenous people??
No more stuffy, constricting bullshit corporate standards, no more obligation to be contractually married to using nothing but red, white and navy. The world is now a blank canvas for the Rome Professional Baseball Club, and I hope for the best that they manage to tap the people and actually get something clever, fun and with high potential to do some magical branding with.