Jack wasn’t a fan of the new name

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Oct. 8, 2008. While Jack was initially not a fan of the new name for Fort Wayne’s Minor League baseball team, it didn’t stop him from attending games. He and Connie were regulars at Parkview Field.

What’s in a name?

Not much, maybe. But the wrong moniker at the wrong time can be a little jarring.

No one expects to run into a ballerina named Bubba or a blacksmith named Fauntleroy, for example.

And in the sports world, it’s important to have a team name that clicks. It helps motivate both the players and the fans.

For Jay County High School, Patriots has been a good fit. Everybody rallies behind the red, white, and blue, and the team’s first graduates got their diplomas during the American Bicentennial.

To a non-fan, the choice may seem trivial. But it’s not. The right name can inspire. And there can be a huge emotional investment on the part of fans.

When the Baltimore Colts became the Indianapolis Colts, Baltimore fans went crazy. It was bad enough to lose their team, but losing the Colts name was like losing a chunk of their identity.

To understand what they went through, you only have to think how you’d feel if Jim Irsay suddenly moved the team to Las Vegas but continued to call them the Colts. These are our Colts today just as intensely as they were Baltimore’s a few decades ago.

At our house, while we’re Colts fans, we’re also big fans of baseball.

And ever since a minor league team located in Fort Wayne, we have been followers, attending an average of five or six games each season. Since it’s more than 100 miles round trip, I guess you could call us serious fans of the Wizards.

That is, you used to be able to call us serious fans of the Wizards.

They’re not the Wizards anymore.

With a new stadium under construction and new ownership, somebody —probably somebody who thought they could make more money in the souvenir shop with a new logo — decided a name change was in order.

Now, admittedly, Fort Wayne Wizards was not the world’s greatest team name. It had a nice bit of alliteration, but there’s never been anything particularly wizardly about the city. Still we got used to it, and the original mascot, dubbed “Wayne the Wizard,” managed to pull it all together.

Wayne’s successor, again after a change in ownership, never quite measured up. His name was “Dinger the Dragon,” and he was shaped like former Dodger manager Tommy LaSorda before Tommy went on a diet.

Now, Dinger too is history.

The Wizards are no more.

That’s okay, you say. Change is good. Get used to it.

And I agreed.

Until the new name was announced, and then I started thinking of ballerinas named Bubba and blacksmiths named Fauntleroy, because the new name is a stinker. It’s a dud.

Someone, trying to strike an appropriate Fort Wayne note, thought the new name should have a connection with local history and lighted on Johnny Appleseed, aka John Chapman.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that Johnny Appleseed’s only connection with Fort Wayne is that he happened to die there. His 19th century wanderings through Ohio and Indiana took him many places, including Jay County where he happened to buy some land up near New Corydon for an orchard. Now, since that may be the only land Johnny Appleseed ever bought, I could argue that we have a better claim to Mr. Chapman’s legacy than Fort Wayne ever will. However, that would just cloud the issue.

Having decided on an Appleseed link, the team didn’t do the obvious and name the team the Appleseeds or the Johnnies, both of which have a certain amount of marketing appeal.

Nope, their selection was much more of a curveball.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new minor league baseball team in Fort Wayne, the TinCaps.

(This is the part of the column where you should be able to hear crickets chirping in the dead silence.)

TinCaps. Johnny Appleseed was sometimes reputed to wear a cooking pot on his head while traveling the frontier. Thus, TinCaps.

And immediately the bad jokes start rolling in.

TinCaps sounds way too much like TinCups, and critics of the new downtown ballpark have accused the team of begging.

Within 24 hours, Journal-Gazette columnist Ben Smith had noted that it’s far too easy for TinCaps to morph into Potheads.

And Tinfoil-caps has already surfaced as a suggestion from those concerned about psychic interference from the planet Neptune.

TinCaps.

This is going to take some getting used to.

C’mon Bubba and Fauntleroy, let’s go watch the Colts.