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Somewhere between the Chihuahuas and the Wahoos, the Flying Squirrels and the Biscuits is a new name for the Gwinnett Braves that the general manager hopes will give the Minor League baseball team what it really needs: more fans at games.
That’s probably wishful thinking, as I’ve learned.
But I can’t stop coming up with questionable ideas that riff on some Gwinnett theme. The Gwinnett Sprawlers? The Gwinnett Mallers? (Get it?)
The Gwinnett Hooches? The Gridlocks? The Gwinnett Sods?
A colleague suggested the Gwinnett Groundhogs.
Gwinnett Braves GM North Johnson inadvertently drove me to this when I recently wrote that he's contemplating dropping the "B" word. He's convinced some people confuse the Gwinnett Braves, a Triple-A team, with its Major League parent, the Atlanta Braves.
Attendance has been sinking for both teams, which is bad in the sports business world.
(The Atlanta Braves have hit their lowest average game attendance in at least 16 years. The Gwinnett Braves had the worst turnout of any Triple-A team in the International and Pacific Coast leagues this year. And that was despite the team making it to its league's playoff finals.
So what new name for the Gwinnett Braves would inspire love, drive merchandise sales and avoid brand confusion? And if the goal is to add a dose of local flavor what exactly is Gwinnett’s local flavor?
Lots of communities would struggle with that issue. Maybe that's why Atlanta ended up with Izzy, the blue blob, for the 1996 Summer Olympics.
I imagine this is a bit like the naming conundrums faced in other industries, like those for new lines of wine and craft beer, where there are always new entries and a struggle to brand them all.
Just keep swinging
Minor League baseball teams rebrand like they’re in batting practice. Just keep swinging. Because to bring in fans, entertainment is often more important than the play on the field.
It’s a free zone for goofy, weird and lovable. Consider the El Paso Chihuahuas, Modesto Nuts, Pensacola Blue Wahoos, Albuquerque Isotopes, Montgomery Biscuits (a pat of butter is part of its image), Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, Richmond Flying Squirrels, Hartford Yard Goats, and my personal favorite, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs.
Mud and earth is a surprisingly popular theme: Batavia Muckdogs, Carolina Mudcats, Midland RockHounds, Toledo Mud Hens, Tri-City Dust Devils.
A lack of inherent ferocity is not frowned on because any mascot can be toughened up. Ever heard of the Columbia Fireflies, Akron RubberDucks, Great Lakes Loons or the Idaho Falls Chukars, which is a plump game bird?
Even non-pro baseball teams are becoming brand machines. Like the new Savannah Bananas of the amateur Coastal Plain League. (Its mascot is a personification of a very intimidating looking banana holding a bat.) More than a decade ago there was a middle Georgia ice hockey team called the Macon Whoopee.
Pleading for ideas
Not every minor league baseball team pushes the boundaries. The Asheville Tourists? Northwest Arkansas Naturals? Vancouver Canadians?
Or, like the Gwinnett Braves — and all but one of the other Braves farm teams — they simply hold the name of their Major League affiliate, which is very brandish but doesn’t inspire much pizzazz.
So I confronted several good citizens in Gwinnett, asking – pleading, really — for ideas for a new team name. Lots told me they don’t really want the name to change. It’s what they know.
One young woman suggested the Gwinnett Nuggets. A man going into a Gwinnett Braves game came up with the Gwinnett Grasshoppers. A high school student suggested the Chipmunks. A guy twirling a sign for a gold-buying business suggested the Gwinnett Eagles. When I asked him for a word that he associated specifically with Gwinnett, he amended his offer to the Gwinnett Friendly Eagles.
Some did not have kind words for my own ideas. You know, the Sprawlers, Mallers, Hoochies stuff. Several winced, in fact.
A professor’s advice
So I called Michael Goldman, a sports marketing professor at the University of San Francisco who has analyzed the impact of changing more than 200 baseball team names in the Minor Leagues. (There’s a specialist in pretty much everything.)
Any time you change a well-known team name, Goldman said, “there is going to be a bunch of people who are not happy with you.”
“In our study of 208 cases of name changes in Minor League baseball over 31 years, we found that changing a name, on the whole, is not a good idea,” he said.
Shifting from a name shared with a Major League team to a more local name sometimes boosts merchandise sales briefly, though it doesn’t seem to help attendance.
I told him about a team name idea the Gwinnett Braves GM came up with and then discarded: The Gwinnett Buttons (because the county is named after Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence).
“That’s interesting,” Goldman said.
As we talked, he scoured Wikipedia for Gwinnett, hunting for something that might hint at a name.
He got interested when he read about the Chattahoochee River, its nickname as “The Hooch” and mention of granite outcroppings.
“That,” he said, “feels to me like it has some legs.”
