WHAT'S IN A DUMB NAME

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-22-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     By the time you read this, the Tampa Bay Rays could be in the World Series, and I'll be left wondering, who the hell would name a sports team THAT? It's not a great name like the New York Yankees, well, isn't either. The truth is that there are a lot of dumb team monikers in the world of professional sports, and I'm just the person to make no sense of it all. There isn't even a city called Tampa Bay. Attendance is so bad at Tropicana Field that the owner may have been open to mollusks and bivalves from the bay buying tickets to the game. The team from Tampa was actually first known as the "Devil Rays," but the owner had some second thoughts, thinking that Satan himself might start showing up at the games, and he'd have to make good on all those deals he made to get the stadium financed.

     The L.A. Dodgers could be their opponent in the Fall Classic. Is there anything lazier than not changing the name of the team you bought, whose name has nothing to do with your town? The "Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers" was their original name, which made a lot more sense in Brooklyn, where 51 people died from being hit by trolleys in 1893. The Los Angeles "Traffic Jam" would be more appropriate; you don't even need to pluralize it, the place is just one big traffic jam from what I've seen. How many lakes would it take to name your team the "Lakers," even if you didn't mind that basketball players don't have much to do with lakes? Would you settle for none? There are plenty of them in Minnesota, and that's probably where the name should have stayed, even if the team didn't.

     I just watched the Buffalo Bills lose tonight on network television, and I thought to myself, even if everyone on the team was an actual buffalo, and its name was Bill, the "Buffalo Bills" would still be a goofy name for a team. I guess you could receive a big bill from a restaurant in Buffalo, and that would be intimidating. You could just as well have named the team the "Buffalo Bobs," given that "The Howdy Doody Show" was at least seen in Buffalo, and "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" was not.

     Who doesn't like red socks? Most people, I'm guessing, but at least you can save some time by writing "Red Sox" instead. Think how much time writing "thanx" instead of "thanks" has saved us over the years. The team from Boston was originally known as the "Red Stockings," which doesn't sound girly to me at all. I seem to be in the minority here, but if I were naming a baseball team, I'd start with some adjectives about how we're going to kick your cotton-picking coccyx, and about the size of our bats as compared to yours, etc. Naming the team based on the color of our undergarments would not have crossed my mind for more than a few moments, and I would not have repeated them to anyone.

     A lot of teams are named after birds: blue jays, orioles, cardinals. In the team logo they look very menacing, as if they might beat the crap out of you in a bar and take your girlfriend. But really, the worst thing a bird has ever done to me was poop on my car, and it was hard to get off. If you want to cow the opposition, call your organization the "St. Louis Cardinal Poops." Less than half the teams in the NFL are even named after anything human, and in the case of the Houston "Texans," the bar for qualifying to make the roster is set pretty low. Most are named for inanimate objects and animals.

     Some franchises had the misguided notion to commemorate a moment in history that no one really cares much about anymore. The "49ers" named their team when they joined the NFL in 1949, but the name refers to the California gold rush, which happened in 1849. and probably won't happen again. A new NBA team named their franchise the "Raptors," two years after a movie came out featuring a bunch of raptors that grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. I'm willing to bet that nobody in management took a timeout to consider that Toronto is not usually known for its dinosaurs, and that in the next few years more movies would come out about other things.

     If you really want to put a scare into your greatest rival, let them think that your experts have crunched every single number on your player, and know every detail about what they intend to do every second of the game. "Keep watching, he's going to scratch himself right in the old end zone. HA! See that?" The rivalry of the future: The New York Statisticians versus the Dallas Data Miners. The geeks shall inherit the Earth.