Tag: minor leagues

Columbus Clingstones: what, you were expecting something better from a Braves affiliate?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MiLB: Atlanta Braves’ AA-affiliates formerly known as the Mississippi Braves, formally change their name to the Columbus Clingstones, with their move to Columbus, Georgia

Originally, I was excited at the notion that along with the move out of racist-ass bumfuck Pearl, Mississippi, the Double-A Braves would be getting a brand-new team name and identity, steering them away from the homogenized and stuffy Also-Braves of Mississippi.  The AA Braves could have the opportunity to be an actual, fun, minor league team instead of being a minor league squad beholden to the stuffy and constricting brand standards of the Atlanta Braves Corporation, as they had been over the last, well since the existence of Braves Minor League Baseball.

But at the same time, I knew that I had to temper my expectations, because baseball in general doesn’t like to rock the boat too much, and for every Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, Rocket City Trash Pandas, Hub City Spartanburgers or any chintzy and creative minor league squad that appears out of nowhere, there are four other boring teams out there, like the Salem Red Sox, St. Lucie Mets, Fredericksburg Nats, and other squads that put the bare minimum of effort into their existences, and hope that by solely being present and loosely affiliated with their parent clubs, they will draw attendance.  And if I had to wager what side of the spectrum that an Atlanta Braves affiliate was going to lean towards, it definitely wasn’t going to be on the side where “fun” was, because fun doesn’t always necessarily equate to cashmoney.

So I was about as surprised as learning that global warming isn’t fake news when the news finally broke, of what the new Columbus Baseball Club was going to call themselves, and it was the Columbus Clingstones.

As I imagine most people’s reactions probably were, mine was first and foremost, what the fuck is a clingstone?

According to Google AIoverlord:

A clingstone is a type of stone fruit with flesh that sticks firmly to the pit, making it more difficult to remove than other fruits. Clingstone peaches are a common example of this type of fruit. 

And my first reaction was, oh, so there’s a difference between the peaches I like, where the pit falls right off, and the peaches that I always regret buying, where the flesh sticks to the pit and I always feel like I’m wasting delectable peach flesh when I have to cut around it to enjoy my fucking fruit, and it turns out that I’m not a fan of actual clingstones, and I’m most definitely not a fan of the name, Columbus Clingstones.

So, it figures that the Braves dropped the ball when it came to having a minor league affiliate with a name that is of below-average excitement.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the Emperors of Rome, and I like the clusterfuck that ended up with the Gwinnett Stripers, but the team had an opportunity to rise into the upper echelon of memorable and noteworthy minor league squads, but to no surprise, much like the organization’s entire modus operandi, stick to something vanilla, safe, boring and mostly forgettable in the vast pool of minor league baseball teams.

I will say though, as not mad just disappointed I am in the lame as name of Clingstones, I do have to give credit to the merch team, for running with the lameduck ball they were handed.  Although I’m not a fan of actual clingstone peaches, I still love peaches the fruit, and they are easily in my top-3 favorite fruits.  And I have a soft spot for mascots that are basically just inanimate objects given eyes and limbs, so that being said, I do appreciate the branding that the Clingstones have done, even if I think the name is booty.

That being said, I do want a shirt of the peach mascot, and I would consider getting a 59fifty cap if there’s a variant where it’s just the peach mascot, but I wouldn’t want anything that actually said Clingstones on it, because that’s how much I loathe the name.

So overall, the name is trash, but the execution of the branding has been done pretty well.  Unfortunately, the name is still set in stone at this point, and there’s no part of me that doesn’t connote the prefix “cling” as a negative, from clingy people to turds that cling to the tips of your dog’s fur after they take a crap that they end up wiping on your floor, so the general consensus to the whole unveiling of the Braves’ AA affiliate is a net-negative.  But then again, expecting anything dynamic and exciting out of the Atlanta Braves organization, even if they’re not officially owned by them anymore, is still like expecting to win a lottery, and this all frankly comes as no surprise.

Good riddance, Pearl

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TIL: the Atlanta Braves will be moving their Double-A minor league affiliate from Pearl, Mississippi to Columbus, Georgia.  They will also be ditching the Braves moniker and will hopefully be something chintzy and marketable

Not that I pay attention to every iota of Braves coverage as I once did at a point in my life, but as a fan of minor league baseball, and for lack of a better term, a fan of the Atlanta Braves, news like this piques my interest, even if this were reported way the fuck back in January of this year.

I mean, I knew that the Braves had relinquished control over all of their minor league squads back in 2021 like selling their debts, and I didn’t hate the news at all quite the contrary, because I felt that it opened the door for Braves affiliates to spread their wings and try to be something more in the spirit of minor league baseball, instead of the boring, stuffy and sterile branding of “The Braves.”

Gwinnett (AAA) had already switched over to becoming the Strippers Stripers, and Rome (A+) as of this years ditched being the Braves and became The Emperors, as in Roman emperor, and better yet, adopted emperor penguins to be their team’s mascot.  Not that I’ve been paying any attention, but for whatever reason, the Mississippi Braves had remained as such over the last two-plus seasons, and despite their freedom to do so, they didn’t appear to be in any rush to make any changes to the organization.

Until this season apparently, as it was announced that the club will be moving out of Pearl, Mississippi and moving to Columbus, Georgia, as well as ditching the Braves moniker and will be adopting a new name for the start of the 2025 minor league season.

At first blush, my thought was, oh great here we go again with a brand new fucking ballpark to build, but it turns out that there’s apparently a historic ballpark in Columbus, Golden Park, that will actually be renovated and used to house the future Columbus Braves affiliate, instead of building something from scratch.  Granted, a renovation isn’t cheap either, and I’m sure it will probably be something of a $65M tax burden for the people of Columbus to absorb, but that sure beats the $126M it took to build the Braves’ Spring Training facility from scratch in Sarasota.

Regardless of the financial burden of accommodations, this is actually a change that I don’t immediately just want to shit on upon hearing about it.  Having been to Pearl, Mississippi, solely to watch a M-Braves game, I have to say that getting the fuck out of that shithole in the middle of goddamn nowhere is nothing but good news for the Braves and frankly, all of Minor League Baseball in that nobody again will ever have to step foot in Pearl/Jackson, Mississippi after the 2024 season.

It’s the only place I’ve ever been to where I genuinely felt like I was whisked back in time at the casual ignorant racism that got in just a singular afternoon in town, from the moment I left the airport, to getting to the ballpark, and while simply getting food.  The cabbie who picked me up from the airport thought that I had to have been an actual player since I was headed to the ballpark, and upon arriving at the ballpark, I caught some kids staring at me and thinking I was Hideki Matsui.

It’s clear that Asian people aren’t a common occurrence in this chunk of the country, but god damn.  During the game, I was puckish so I went up to a concession stand where there were unsurprisingly chicken tenders and fries, and when I handed over my debit card to pay, the lady at the register examined my card and put down her bifocals, and then said to me, “oh that’s an easy one.”

Obviously having no fucking clue to what she was talking about, I asked her what, and she responded that it was my name, that it was one of those names that wasn’t too hard to pronounce.  Okay then

So needless to say, it seems like a monumental win for any person or any business or in this case, any team, to get the fuck out of Pearl, Mississippi, and head closer to somewhere that’s closer to their parent organization.  Columbus isn’t a tremendous step up from Pearl as far as not feeling like you’re in the middle of nowhere, but at least it’s a military town where people have had some etiquette and discipline beaten into them, and it’s only like a 2-3 hour drive to the Metro Atlanta area if anyone wants to feel some actual civilization.

I’m excited to eventually find out what the team will lean towards as far as a new team name, branding and identity will be.  I don’t know much about Columbus other than it being a military town, so I can’t take any snarky takes or come up with any sarcastic names to anoint them as, but hopefully the yokels out there will have the wherewithal to steer clear of the low-hanging fruit of Christopher, whom we all with brains have heard wasn’t exactly the best guy in history.

But hey, there’s always the Columbus Barves, wouldn’t that be some shit, to take the popularized typo-meme-unofficial sarcasm name for whenever the team fucks up, and make it official?  A guy can dream.

Not my MiLB logo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Apparently I missed this way back from September: but Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball have agreed to change the official logo of Minor League Baseball

And of course this wouldn’t be a post if I didn’t, but I absolutely hate it, thanks.

Fewer things are a sign of mediocrity and spinning wheels like a logo rebranding.  This was not a case like the Cleveland Indians really needing to get rid of a horrifically racist mascot, this was the case of some bored corporate stooges looking for things that weren’t broken and decided to fix them anyway, to justify their existences.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the previous MiLB logo.  It was subtle, it was understandable, and most importantly, it was just different enough to where the shape and brand positioning of it was always consistent to MLB standards, but the visual identity of the icon itself was different enough for those looking to understand that this was Minor League and not the MLB icon that any sports fan or casual could understand.

In one of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken with my mom, I’m wearing the old MiLB logo generic shirt.

Now this new crappy logo is basically identical to the MLB logo, except the batter is aligned to the left, and instead of a baseball coming towards the batter, it now looks like the batter has sat looking at four pitches that are now past him, and considering the escalating rate of strikeouts throughout the last half-century, the guy in the logo has probably struck-out, as much as the logo itself does in my opinion.

I hate to say it, but there are a lot of baseball fans that aren’t particularly intelligent.  The Gwinnett Braves used the excuse that there were people that actually managed to confuse tickets for G-Braves tickets for tickets for the Atlanta Braves, which I didn’t think was really a believable excuse, but I’m also not going to pretend like baseball fans are always the smartest people in the world either.  This new logo is going to 100% confuse people into thinking they’re going to Major League games and buying Major League apparel, but perhaps that really is the end game, and I’m just being hyper critical of a tactic that I think is petty, but is really some corporate shills really living in 2050 and playing chess.

And I don’t understand why they’ve put a color palette behind it, especially of two shades of blue.  MLB logos, especially on apparel, namely baseball caps, often times already ditch their own color palette and adopt the primary and secondary colors of the team, or they just go reverse white, as not to compete with the colors of the teams, especially ones that don’t utilize the navy and red palette of the MLB logo.  This Carolina/Dook blue combo logo just seems odd and uncharacteristic to professional baseball in general, where it seems like the vast majority of teams utilize shades of red, at all levels of the game.  For all the teams like the Blue Rocks or the Stone Crabs or the Pelicans that utilize shades of blue, there are teams like the Redbirds, Nuts, Crawdads and much more where adding a logo of blues into their branding is more like shoehorning a horse’s hoof into a toddler’s shoe.

Either way, I am very much not a fan of the new MiLB logo.  It is uncreative, homogenized, convoluted, and was something that never needed to be updated in the first place.  Not that I’m going to many baseball games at all these days, but a team’s branding is going to have to work just a little bit harder to make me decide to impulsively drop some cash on any team merch if it’s going to have this little blue turd of a brand slapped onto it.

There may be four stars on the logo, but if it were up to me, it would have none.

Introducing the Rome Emperors

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t hate it: the Rome Professional Baseball Club formerly known as the Rome Braves, unveils new team name and branding identity, the Rome Emperors

Sure, it’s not the snarky low-hanging fruit like the Rome Rednecks, or the outside-the-box idea I had of calling them the Floyd County Archers, but it’s not like we didn’t know that it was going to be something safe, kid-friendly, and homogenized, because at the end of the day, the Rome Professional Baseball Club is still a business and going safe, kid-friendly and homogenized is still the modus operandi of trying to squeeze money out of as many demographics and parties as possible.

So yeah, the Rome Emperors – as stated above, I don’t hate it.  Smart to have unveiled everything at once, or at least that’s how I found out because I live under a rock and this was fed to me by friends before I could even find out about something this baseball minutiae on my own like I used to, but whatever, because I saw everything all at once, I didn’t have time to speculate, dissect and eventually hate it, because everything was done upon delivery.

There’s one aspect that likes that they’re calling themselves Emperors, which sends a message that they intend to rule the Sally League or the Carolina League, or whatever level of A-ball they’re in these days, I’ve lost track, but at the end of the day, Minor League baseball is still a feeder league to higher leagues, and so often times is the case, especially with Braves affiliates, is that their records aren’t ever really that great.  I don’t remember the last time, or ever, when a Braves affiliate won a league championship, so it’s kind of funny that they have the name of Emperors, but will more often than not, be doing anything but ruling the league.

It’s kind of like Team Emperor in Initial D, because they were introduced to be this badass guerilla team of Evos that dominated lower-tier street racing clubs, but then eventually became another fodder squad to the Hachi-roku, the Redsuns, Kogashiwa’s MR2 and even Mako and Sayuki’s Sil-Eighty.  In spite of the menacing sounding name, they ultimately were just mid, at best.

Regardless, in spite of the snarky analysis, good on the organization for picking a name that remotely goes tangibly with the name Rome, and I like the explanation of their direction to go with a penguin, instead of the Little Caesar’s mascot, because when the day is over, everyone loves animals and frankly I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like penguins. 

Sure, it’s ironic that an animal most known for living in arctic conditions will be the mascot for a team that plays in a state that has nuclear summers, but when kids and grown-ups like me that like chintzy, novelty crap like penguins with baseball bats see a penguin, there’s money to be made in moving merch.

Not lost in the rebrand is the fact that they actually got away with using the overkill’d Trajan font with the Rome wordmark on their away jerseys, because if there was ever something that could get a pass on using the most basic and Rome-ey fonts there ever was, it was a brand that was actually called Rome.  I still think they’re lazy for not sharpening off the tips of the serifs, but at the same time, I can understand why.

Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the rebrand altogether.  Kudos to the organization for pulling it off, even if I wish they didn’t try to sparsely try to satisfy the Braves by keeping so much red in their branding, but baby steps, I suppose.  They’ve already taken great strides stepping away from their overlords, and hopefully things can only get better from here.

I look forward to (not) hearing about the promotions, shenanigans and general business that the team will be able to do in the coming season and in the future, when they’re not quite so held down by the shackles of the Atlanta Braves stuffy corporate branding.

Voting for the Rome Rednecks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading “Voting for the Rome Rednecks” →

It only took a year (and change)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But I finally have my Montgomery Kimchi cap.  Ever since I found out that the hicks in Montgomery, Alabama aren’t all racist shitheads and decided to have some Korean heritage nights, complete with renaming the Biscuits the Kimchi for a night, complete with new branding and identity, I knew that I didn’t just want to have a Kimchi cap, but that I needed to have a Kimchi cap.

Leading up to the event, I was eventually appalled when informed that there would be no ballcaps available.  “Next year,” is what I was informed when reaching out.   I was crushed, but settled on a Mr. Kimchi mascot t-shirt that was available, in very sparse and limited quantities.

Obviously, short of me setting up a long-in-the-future Google alert or something, it didn’t occur to me to keep an eye out on the Biscuits’ schedule for the 2022 season, but a KBO group on theFacebook that I’m a member of posted something about the Montgomery Kimchi a few months ago, and it jogged my memory to quickly check.  Sure enough, there were Kimchi caps for sale, but by the time I started looking at them, they were basically wiped out, and most definitely my NewEra size of 7 1/2 were all gone.  One again, I was disappointed, but I figured that once the 2022 Korean heritage night rolled up, there would probably be more stock, hopefully.

Except upon further digging, I found out that Korean heritage night had already passed, with the Kimchi emerging (and losing) way the fuck back in April.  I was mortified by this, because surely there was little reason for the team to go out of their way to restock merch for an event that had already passed.  And then the tab I kept open for the specific item eventually turned into a 404, and it seemed very apparent that my window to get the cap that I didn’t want but needed, had closed. 

Funny thing is though, I didn’t close the tab on my phone.  And one day, after a restart of my phone, I noticed that the tab’s thumbnail wasn’t the 404 page anymore, and upon refreshing the actual page, it turned out that Kimchi caps were suddenly back on the table once again.  Unlike 80% of the time I see something I want, but don’t pull the trigger, I didn’t wait at all to get my wallet out.  Furthermore, they still didn’t have a 7 1/2, but I wasn’t willing on taking any chances and risk missing out again, so I actually got a size up at 7 5/8.  A few minutes later, and my order was confirmed – I was finally going to get the Kimchi cap that I needed.

And here we are.  After a year and some change, I’ve finally got one of the greatest ballcaps to my collection.  The funniest thing is that the more prestige I put onto a cap, the less I’ll actually wear it, because I don’t want to risk them getting grungy and dirty or rained on, thus defeating the purpose of caps in the first place, but the most important thing is that I got it finally, and I’ll wear it with pride and joy; whenever the conditions are optimal for me to actually wear it.

No Ian, we won’t

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Long story short: Major League Baseball is still in lockout; Cubs’ outfielder Ian Happ “hopes the fans understand what they’re fighting for”

Here’s the actual quote:

The players are so heavily committed to getting this thing back on track and we hope that the fans understand what we’re fighting for.

As the subject of this post says, no Ian, we won’t.  We will never understand what baseball players are fighting for, because we all know it’s just money.  It’s always money, it’s never anything other than money, and anything else that is ever mentioned is just another roundabout way of saying money.

So no Ian, we the fans will never understand why baseball players whose league minimum salary for the even shittiest player on the 25-man roster is practically $500,000, are trying to get even more money.  Especially considering every team’s MLB Players Association rep is usually a veteran player who probably makes anywhere from $4-32 million dollars a year, and is somehow trying to bilk even richer assholes who run the league and the teams out of more money, while prices for parking, food, apparel and tickets continue to rise and rise for the fans that actually fund all this entire racket in the first place.

Up to this point, I didn’t really care that baseball was still in a strike.  Over the last few years, it seems like every major sports league seems to go into some sort of strike, be it players or referees, leading to all sorts of shitshow bullshit, and then the conflicts are settled, and things go back to normal, to the point where it’s no real surprises anymore when some other sport league goes into a strike anymore.

I figured that eventually this MLB strike would end, players strong arm the league and the owners out of more money, who will then turn their losses onto the fans; millionaire players and billionaire owners end up making more money than ever, while the fan experience gets more expensive and the sun rises in the morning. 

We then have a chaotic season where there ambitious players who workout privately and/or go apeshit on performance enhancing drugs while testing is off the table are ready for the work stoppage to end and put up ridiculous numbers and highlights through the season, while on the other side of the coin there are lots of lazy players who take their job for granted get out of shape, and get shelled through a season but manage to keep their jobs because baseball teams are suckers for sunk cost fallacy. 

And there are lots of injuries because people are out of shape, or their bodies are in turmoil from going apeshit on performance enhancing drugs while testing is off the table.

But I didn’t really care that the strike was going on.  I’ve got enough on my plate to where baseball is unfortunately an afterthought, as much as I do love the game, in spite of how critical I can get towards it, but it’s because I care, damn it.

But then seeing Ian Happ’s remarks about hoping fans understand why they’re going on strike just set me off, because it’s just a perfect example of how tone deaf baseball players themselves can be when they stop realizing how privileged they are to be making money at all for playing a kid’s game at an incredible level.

Take Happ himself for example.  The guy is set to make $8 million dollars in 2022 that will undoubtedly be less than that because the stoppage.  The guy has already made about $8 million dollars in baseball salary alone at this point, and if he has any bit of IQ outside of baseball, could probably very easily live out the rest of his life very comfortably at the age of 27.

And he wants more money.  All of his MLBPA compatriots want more money.  And the funny thing is that Ian Happ is a pleeb, in comparison to some of the other guys on the MLBPA that is “fighting for,” more money. 

Like Max Scherzer – this guy is legitimately contractually obligated to be paid $43 fucking million dollars in 2022 alone, for throwing a baseball over and over again.  His current career earnings from baseball alone have already exceeded $139 million dollars.  If he stopped playing at the end of his current contract, he will clear $300 million dollars.  And because baseball is full of laughably stupid, idiotic contracts, even if he were to retire in 2024, he would still make $60 million dollars over the following four years because of deferred payment from the Nationals and Dodgers.

This guy wants more money too.

Make no mistake, the end goal of this strike benefits nobody but these greedy fucks who think baseball is absolutely indispensable in the grand spectrum of the world’s needs.  I love the game, and I’ll always love the game at this point, but I’d love to see the owners and commissioner’s office hold their ground, and the season grinds to a full halt. Laughably it would only apply to the MLB season, and as 2020 showed, when ‘Murica needed baseball to watch, they simply outsourced that need to Korea, and ESPN started broadcasting KBO in the states.

Furthermore, Minor League Baseball wouldn’t be affected by this, and if you don’t think television rights to broadcast the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Rocket City Trash Pandas, Montgomery Biscuits, Toledo Mud Hens, Modesto Nuts and all the other gaudy but still competitive minor league baseball wouldn’t suddenly be hot tickets, the Major Leagues would become a fast afterthought.  Casual fans and lovers of the game will find their salvation in the minor leagues, and MLB can go choke on a bag of dicks.

It wouldn’t happen, because at some point, one party is going to blink, but it’s fun to imagine the global baseball power shift if MLB comes off the table at their own greedy volition.