The Cleveland Baseball Team Adopted a Non-Racist Moniker Now Trump Wants it to Go Back

 

                                The new Cleveland MLB name, logos and uniform patches. 

The sting felt by Cleveland baseball fans when the ownership finally was coerced by MLB to drop its Indians name, mascot, and logo has largely faded in the fourth season as the Guardians.  Fans remained loyal and there have been moments to cheer about.  Enter Donald Trump desperate for any distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein case exploding in his golden toilet—strip Rosie O’Donald of her citizenship, make Coca-Cola use American cane sugar, suggest that Disney/ABC make Jimmie Kimmel the next silenced TV comedy.  Now comes an order to the owners of Cleveland and National Football League Washington Commanders to revert to their old identities or else.  There were implied threats to Federal approval and funding for a new Washington stadium.  So far at least Guardian officials demure.

Four years ago, while they attention of sports fans was diverted by the opening hoopla for the Tokyo Olympics on the traditional late Friday afternoon dump for stories that flacks want buried the Cleveland American League franchise finally announced a new name starting the next season—the Guardians.  The team put up a long, bitter fighting retreat before giving up the ghost of the Indians entirely.

They tried to soften the blow to fans who were bitterly opposed to the end of their cherished tradition by having Tom Hanks, America’s most beloved movie star, appear in an introductory video announcement.  Besides being a Hollywood liberal, Hanks worked briefly in Cleveland theater early in his career and was a star of one of the most revered baseball films of all time, A League of Their Own.  

 

 Two of the four art deco Bridge Guardians that inspired the new name can be seen from Progressive Field.

Also on hand was the winner of a contest to come up with the new name.  The Guardians is a reference to well-known art deco statues located on the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River that connects downtown Cleveland where team’s home Progressive Field is located to the city’s trendy Ohio City neighborhood. The statues were known as the Guardians of Traffic.  The wing headgear of the statues was echoed on the new team logo.  It was probably no accident that Guardians rhymes with Indians.

At a press conference, Cleveland owner Paul Dolan said the organization hoped Guardians will “divert us from a divisive path” and eventually be embraced by the entire fanbase and region.  “We acknowledge the name change will be difficult for some of us, and the transition will take time.  Those memories do not diminish with a new name.”

Fan outrage and disappointment was echoed and stoked by right-wing media wailing about cancel culture, their new buzzword bugaboo, and the cherished tradition of being as racist as possible.

It is worth a look back at how all of this came to be.

 

 A racially sensitive Cleveland fan arguing with a Native American that the Indians were just trying to honor his people.

Back in January 2018 at the annual Major League Baseball Winter Meetings Cleveland ownership announced it would stop using the onerous and offensive Chief Wahoo logo on their uniforms, in programs and scorecards, and on display at Progressive Field beginning in 2019.  They promised to reduce usage in that upcoming season but didn’t want to make the Chief’s die-hard fans suffer withdrawal cold turkey.

The team finally acted after years of protests by Native American and their allies and mounting pressure from MLB, League honchos, advertisers, and Progressive Insurance which paid through the nose for naming rights to the ballpark. Way back in 2000 when the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) held its annual General Assembly in Cleveland I participated with hundreds of delegates, Native Americans, and local activists in a march to the ballpark, then called Jacobs Field from the convention site through downtown in an epic pouring rainstorm to demand the mascot and team nickname be changed.  And that was well after protests on the issue began. 

Since then, hundreds of high schools, inter-collegiate, amateur, and semi-pro teams in all sports have given up offensive logos, mascots, and team names.  My old high school in Skokie, Illinois dumped the nickname Indians years ago for the Wolves and the University of Illinois finally abandoned their war dancing mascot and Chief Illiniwek logo although they steadfastly refused to give up the team moniker, the Fighting Illini, supposedly in honor of the all-but-vanished tribe from which the state took its name.

Cleveland may have been the first professional team to partially break a solid wall of opposition to Native American pressure.  Ownership of the Washington Redskins was belligerently defiant to demands that the team change its nickname from a slur used by White people akin to the use of the word “Niger”.  A few years ago, the United States Patent Office removed copywrite protection from the name and team logo because they were patently offensive, and act which threatened the massive profitability of official team merchandise to both the franchise and the National Football League.  The action was upheld through two rounds of appeals, but in 2018 in a separate case the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that, “the First Amendment forbids government regulators to deny registration because they find speech likely to offend others.”  Gleeful Washington ownership, with cheerleading from then Presidential Candidate Donald Trump declared total victory and vindication. 

But the NFL ramped up pressure anyway.  Washington was forced to drop it former name and logo and had to play as the Washington Football Team.  After troglodyte owner Daniel Snyder finally relented to pressure and the team was embroiled in yet another nasty controversy for sexual harassment and cultivating a hostile work environment his wife, former model Tanya Snyder was named as co-CEO in 2020 that the team would announce a new name and logo in January for use in the 2023 season.  That name was not be the Warriors which Snyder tried to promote as an end-run around Native American objections.  Neither they nor the NFL were fooled or impressed by that gambit.

The name finally selected was the Washington Commanders.

 

 Apparently I wasn't the only one to come up with this suggested solution the Washington NFL team problem...

Before it became official I suggested to Washington ownership that they could solve the problem and keep the use of their beloved nickname if they would just change their logo and mascot to a russet potato.  Oddly, they never got back to me.

In Atlanta the National League Braves have also vowed to keep their name their logo which features a tomahawk, not a caricature or representation of a Native American.  A few years ago, they got rid of a mascot who danced on a giant tom-tom whenever the team hit a homerun and management tried to discourage the widely criticized Tomahawk Chop cheer in their new digs at SunTrust Park in the near lily white suburban Cobb County.  So far they have not had much luck.

In Chicago the Blackhawks logo is particularly revered.  In 2019 their scarlet red home sweaters emblazoned with a war-painted profile allegedly representing the famed Fox-Sauk war chief, was named the most beautiful uniform in the National Hockey League.  A hard core of team fans exploded after the club won Stanley Cup Trophies in 2010, ’13, and ’15 and team merchandise  eclipsed both the faltering Bears and Bulls as the favorite of the winter sports bar crowd. Chicago hipsters and old fans from the city’s ethnic neighborhoods were for once are united.  The Wirtz family is making money like never before and now sits on top of the most valuable franchise in the NFL, largely due to attachment to the logo.  But they, too, might finally have to give way, probably preserving the name but changing the logo to a black raptor. 

 

Chief Wahoo was still be available on "vintage" caps and other merchandise for sale at the ballpark and presumably on the team on-line store.  The other caps are a reminder of how others might feel about logo "tributes" to them.

In Cleveland, Chief Wahoo did not at first vanish completely from the ballpark.  Vintage caps, jerseys and other merchandise remained on sale in the stadium’s shops and souvenir stands.  The club retained their copyright on the logo and continued to profit from the sale of the stuff. 

The team had hoped that the sacrifice of Chief Wahoo, which they insisted was an homage to a 19th Century Native American ballplayer on an entirely different and long vanished Cleveland team could preserve the name. Yeah, sure, blame it on the Indian….

 

Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot from Maine, finally got a rookie card from Topps in 2003, a 105 years after he left the old National League Cleveland Spiders. 

On March 9, 1897 the Cleveland Spiders of the National League signed a full-blooded Penobscot, Louis Sockalexis to the team roster.  The speedy young outfielder first gained fame as a collegiate at Holy Cross and briefly for Notre Dame before being expelled for alcohol use.  Within days, he was signed by the very needy Spiders.  Almost immediately sports writers and fans began to informally call the team the Indians. 

The team, which included legendary hurler Cy Young, had been dealt a blow when team owners the Robinson Brothers bought a controlling interest in the St. Louis Cardinal franchise and stripped the Ohio squad of their star players to fill the Red Bird roster.  Cleveland fell to the bottom of the league like a stone.  It has been called the worst Major League team of all time.

In the first half of the season Sockalexis gave them some hope with solid hitting, four home runs in the dead ball era, and especially with his base stealing.   After an injury limited his playing time the team slid back into oblivion. Attendance plummeted so badly that they had to play most of their games on the road, earning another nickname the Wanderers. 

The National League put the team out of its misery after the 1899 season. 

The following year the minor American League fielded a team in Cleveland playing in the Spiders’ old League Park.  In 1901 the American League broke the National Agreement by declaring itself a new Major League. 

The new club struggled to find a moniker that fits.  They tried on the Bluebirds, Blues, and Broncos without much success.  When star player Napoleon Lajoie joined the team in 1902 he was quickly named team captain and his squad dubbed the Naps.  Lajoie stayed with the team part of the time as player/manager until as an aging star he was traded away in 1915 to Philadelphia. 

 

The selection of the Indians for the American League team in 1915 was not universally welcomed.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran this mocking cartoon that seemed to object on racist grounds.  Or it could be that the newspaper contest that picked the name was run in a competing paper. 

A newspaper contest was launched to find a new name.  The Indians won, reportedly in honor of the long departed Sockalexis, but also to play on the success of the Boston Braves who won the Word Series the year before. 

There were still some tough years ahead, but things turned around with the arrival of Tris Speaker as player/manager in 1919 who led them to World Series victory against the Brooklyn Robins. 

The Chief Wahoo logo, however, does not date back to those glory days.  In fact, it did not make and appearance until the relatively late date of 1947 although at least three generic Indian profiles were sporadically used on uniforms in previous years..  That year a spunky young player/manager named Lou Boudreau and a red-hot pitcher Bob Feller were leading the team to something of a resurgence after years of futility.  Excitement was building even before the season and owner Bill Veek was eager to do anything to boost attendance at the old Municipal Stadium.  Veek commissioned a new logo from a cartoonist who came up with the grinning caricature that later became known as Chief Wahoo. 

 

The original cartoon logo commissioned by Bill Veek and Larry Dolby, the first Black player in the American League, sporting it.  

Veek was famously progressive on race issues and that season signed Larry Dolby as the first Black player in the American League just weeks after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Dodgers.  But that was the heyday of cowboy and Indian shoot-‘em-ups in the Saturday matinees.  No one objected.  But then, few were complaining about Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, or even pickaninnies as commercial icons.

The team placed fourth in the American League that year, 13 games behind the mighty Yankees, but they were clearly on the rise and fans came back to the ballpark to see them.  But that probably had more to do with Boudreau and Feller than a cartoon Indian.

 

                                                                       The team mascot got his name from the comic strip character Big Chief Wahoo.

The mascot character picked up his nick name from a Publisher’s Syndicate comic strip and short lived series of comic books from the 1940’s called Big Chief Wahoo.  And yea, the comics were as racist as you can imagine. 

Organized objections by Native Americans did not come until the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and built steadily.  The team has periodically updated the Chief Wahoo logo and claimed that the last changes were intended to make the mascot less offensive.  Those changes satisfied no one.

As for the supposed inspiration for the team nickname, Sockalexis was described by none other than John McGraw as the greatest natural talent he ever saw, had started out on an outstanding rookie season.  But the pressure of fame got to him, and he drank heavily.  Midway through the season he drunkenly leapt from a brothel window smashing his ankle.  He could play only sporadically for the next two years and was out of the big leagues by the time the Spiders folded in 1899.

On Christmas Eve, 1913, Sockalexis died in Burlington, Maine.  He suffered from chronic heart disease, diabetes, and complications of alcoholism.

 

Hustling Chicago Reporter Gave Birth to the Baseball All Star Game

  

Nosebleed seats at Comiskey Park for the All Star Game went for just a buck plus tax, affordable to many ordinary stiffs even in a Depression year.

The election of Pete Crow-Armstrong and Kyle Tucker to the National League team for the upcoming All Star Game is creating a lot of excitement among Cubs fans.  The duo will patrol 2/3 of the outfield and provide plenty of power at the plate.  The last time the team sent two outfielders to the starting lineup was 1936 when now largely forgotten Augie Galan and Frank Demaree made the squad.  That was just three years after the first game in 1933.  Their selection might well have been influenced by the game’s founder and the Trib’s long and murky shadow over the selection process for the game on June 6, 1933

Give credit where credit was due.  It was all Arch Ward’s original idea.  He was the sports editor and principle baseball writer for the Chicago Tribune, the 800 lb. gorilla of Second City and Mid-Western newspapers.  Why not, he suggested, stage a mid-summer exhibition game featuring the biggest stars of the American and National Leagues to coincide with the Century of Progress—the World’s Fair on the Lake—in 1933.  

 

Chicago Tribune reporter and promoter of the first All Star Game, Arch Ward even eventually got his own baseball card. 

At first the two leagues, which had, at best, an uneasy relationship with each other were reluctant.  But the Depression was cutting into attendance at all but a handful of ballparks and Ward and his supporters soon convinced owners that the national attention could boost ticket sales.  It also helped that Ward was a crony of Tribune owner Col. Robert R. McCormick and a political powerhouse in the Republican Party and hyper-conservative circles on his own—views fervently shared by most owners.

The concept of All-Star teams was not unknown.  Back in the earliest days of the National League Albert Spaulding toured nationally and even internationally with hand selected squads in the off-season.  Various star players were still assembling all-star teams—usually made up more of cronies than a full squad of actual stars—and barnstorming against local teams.  And the chance to see Big Leaguers in tank towns and back waters did bring out fans in droves.  Now a lot of those same small town fans would be flocking to the big city for the fair.

Otherwise there was scant play between the two leagues except in spring training where many teams saw each other in the Florida Grapefruit League.  Except, of course, for the goofy Cubs who trained in far off Catalina Island, California for no good reason except that the Wrigley family owned property there.   Sometimes in cities with teams in both leagues—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago—inter-city exhibition games were scheduled, usually at the end of spring training or after the regular season was over. 

 

 More than 49,000 fans jammed Comiskey Park for the 1933 All Star Game.

In the days when players tended to spend all or most of their careers with one team, even the players were unfamiliar with each other unless they had played with or against each other in the minor leagues.

Players for the exhibition game, which was expected to be a once-in-a-life-time extravaganza, were selected in a system that somehow combined the choices of each league’s managers with a fan poll conducted not-too-scientifically or reliably by the Tribune and a handful of other newspapers.  The results were predictable.

 

The power house of an American League team was dominated by the heart of the New York Yankee line-up.  

The American League team under Philadelphia manager Connie Mack was a heavy hitting power house long on home run hitters  and dominated by the princes of baseball—New York Yankees sluggers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Ben Chapman in addition to hurler Lefty Gomez.  The starting squad also included two members of the White Sox—Jimmy Dykes and Al Simmons, both new to the team that year from a trade with the Philadelphia Athletics.

The National League, by contrast, still relied on small ball—slap hitting, singles, doubles, steals, aggressive base running, bunts and sacrifices, working the count for walks.  Pitching was aggressive, brush backs and intentional bean balls a part of the game.  The whole style of play was aggressive, rhubarbs with umpires and bench clearing brawls were common.  The team, while talented and suited for such play, did not feature the kind of legends-in-the-making on the American roster.  Veteran Giants manager John McGraw fielded a team that included Pepper Martin, Frankie Fritche, and Jimmie Wilson all of the league dominating St. Louis Cardinals along with starting pitcher Bill Hallahan.  The Cubs placed no players among the starters.  Their biggest star, catcher Gabby Harnett and short stop Woody English were reserves along with pitcher Lon Warneke.

 

The scrappy National League featured small ball specialists. 

Since the game was to be played at the White Sox home of Comiskey Park, the umpires were from the American League.  And that made a difference, too, because umpiring styles were very different between the two leagues.  American umpires squatted behind enormous, inflated chest protectors behind the plate.  That caused them to have a high strike zone friendly to sluggers.  Sluggers whaling away also reduced walks.  National League players were used to umpires with padded chest protectors worn discretely under their wool suit coats.  That enabled them to get down low behind the plate and their strike zone was low—from the knees to just above the belt, barely.  They called more balls working the count up and causing hurlers to throw more pitches.

With huge national advance publicity, fans flocked to standing-room-only Comiskey Park and milled around on the streets outside.  In downtown areas of major cities fans gathered to watch play-by-play coverage flashed on electronic scroll signs just as they did for World Series games.  Millions hunkered by their radios as the game was broadcast nationally by both the NBC and CBS radio networks.  Cameras from all of the major Newsreel companies ground away from the grandstand roof.  The press box was jammed to overflowing scores of sportswriters from every major and most minor cities plus national magazines.

As for the game itself, it was not quite the American League blowout almost everyone expected.

 A White Sox bat boy greets Babe Ruth at home after his first ever All Star /Game home run.  The Babe even made a rare stellar defensive play later in the game. 

In the bottom of the second the American League got on the board when pitcher Hallahan issued one-out walks to Jimmy Dykes and Joe Cronin. Two batters later, pitcher Lefty Gomez singled home Dykes for the first run. In the bottom of the third, after a walk to Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth famously hit the first home run in All-Star Game history, putting the AL up 3-0. Hallahan was chased from the game after walking Lou Gehrig immediately afterward and was replaced by Cub Lon Warneke.  General Crowder replaced Gomez to start the fourth inning. In the sixth, Warneke hit a one-out triple and scored on a Pepper Martin groundout. Frankie Frisch followed with a home run to bring the NL to within a run, but after a Chuck Klein single, Crowder would escape the inning without giving up any more damage.

Cronin led off the bottom of the sixth with a single. After advancing on a bunt, he scored on an Earl Averill single to extend the lead to 4-2. Crowder was replaced by Lefty Grove in the top of the seventh, while Warneke was replaced by Carl Hubbell in the bottom of the inning. The NL looked like they had a chance in the top of the eighth. With Frisch on first with two outs, Chick Hafey lined a shot to right field that looked like it could be home run, but Ruth, in rare defensive acrobatics, reached over the wall to catch it, denying the NL a chance to tie the game. Grove retired the side in order in the ninth to secure the American League’s victory.

 

Fans could purchase this souvenir program book and score card with a complimentary stub of a pencil at the first contest.  Intended as a one-and-off fan enthusiasm encouraged regular inter-league contests.

All in all an exciting, if kind of old fashion, baseball game that left fans satisfied and wanting more.

And more they got.  The game became an annual event and as predicted raised interest in baseball and ticket sales across the country.