The Cleveland Indians Aggregated 1,198 Options for a New Name
As you know, Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians will no longer be the Cleveland Indians.
They announced in 2020 that they’d be changing their name, a move concurrent with the Washington Football Team and Edmonton Elks and other sports franchises with monikers deemed “problematic” in a changing world. It was spurred by George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing wave of social justice that spread across the country.
The Indians want to show everyone that they’re taking this seriously, and doing their due diligence, and so they launched an interactive webpage that describes every single thing they have embarked upon in order to reach a new name.
The page itself is total overkill. It goes on and on and talks about the 100+ hours of brainstorming sessions they’ve done. There have been 14 rounds of vetting to narrow down name options that amounted to 1,198. Then, they’re gonna do this:
There are a couple of videos on the page, too, with snippets of Zoom call discussions involving young Cleveland professionals and local influencers and whatnot. It’s creative and well done but t’s way too much.
It’s kind of like in the movie Half Baked, where Dave Chappelle goes to prison to visit Kenny and tells him about how they’re going to sell marijuana to bail him out of jail. Kenny gets fed up and says something to the effect of, “yeah just do it, go sell weed.” He doesn’t care about the plan he just wants it done, and that’s where the Indians are right now, I think. Nobody needs to hear all of this fancy-schmancy stuff about choosing the new name. Just pick a name and get it over with already. It’s just Cleveland anyway, so it’s not that important.