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.
But more importantly, I look forward to the snarky and sarcastic options that will undoubtedly be cast and never published by the team. After all, most people don’t even know where Rome, Georgia is, much less know anything about the place to where they could come up with an appropriate name for the team.
And as low-hanging fruit as Rome Rednecks is, I’ve been to Rome several times, because I’m a big baseball nerd that loves minor league baseball, and as god as my witness, Rome truly is the redneck country, and it really isn’t a far reach to say that it would be if anything at all, an accurate name to use.
But aside from rednecks, Berry College and being housed in Floyd County, which is not to be mistaken by the studio that created Archer, if there’s one notorious thing that Rome, Georgia is actually known for, is that it’s where one of the most detested Americans in the country represents, in Marjorie Taylor Greene, the state rep for Georgia’s 14th district, which includes Rome.
Ironically, despite the fact that Rome is trying to ditch the Braves name, if there were any minor league affiliates that probably was most appropriate to be associated with Native Americans, it probably would be Rome, because they have a pretty rich indigenous history, more than Atlanta, despite the fact that the name comes from Boston and Milwaukee previously.
Either way, kudos to the Rome Professional Baseball Club for breaking their shackles and deciding to break free from their suffocating parent club that no longer owns them anymore. I look forward to seeing what lame, vanilla, homogenized name and identity that the team comes settles on in the end, because as recent history may recall, the Gwinnett Braves held a similar contest to let the fans choose the name, but ultimately in the end went with the Stripers, which wasn’t even on the final ballot. Then again, they were still owned by the Braves then, and pulled a very Braves-ey manuever; Rome is not held to such constraints, so hopefully their end result will be a little bit more entertaining.
Ooh, I know – the Rome Barves!
