Cleveland's Major League Baseball Team Will Drop Its Indians Nickname
By: jareddiamond (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Cleveland Indians will drop the team's longtime nickname, abandoning a moniker that has been the subject of protest by fans and Native American groups who criticized it as racist, a person familiar with the matter said Sunday.
The decision comes months after the Washington Football Team of the NFL dropped a name that had been seen as a racial slur. The changes come in the wake of a broad reckoning over racial and social injustice in the U.S. that was sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, while in Minneapolis police custody.
It is unclear at this point what the Indians will call themselves or exactly when they will fully retire the Indians name. An official announcement will likely come this week, but the team isn't expected to unveil a new name at that time. During the 2019 season, Cleveland eliminated Chief Wahoo—a grinning, red-faced caricature of a Native American that served as their logo — from their uniforms, caps and signs at Progressive Field.
Cleveland's American League baseball franchise has been known as the Indians since 1915, when local journalists proposed the name as a replacement for the previous nickname: the Naps, after Hall-of-Famer Nap Lajoie. The Indians name was supposedly a way to honor Louis Sockalexis, a member of the Penobscot tribe who played outfield for another professional baseball club in the city in the late 19th Century.
The Cleveland baseball club didn't immediately respond to a request for a comment. The decision to make the change was originally reported by the New York Times.
In July, hours after the Washington Football Team announced that it would conduct a "thorough review" of its previous name, Cleveland's baseball team revealed that it would reexamine its name as well. Though the club played the 2020 season as the Indians, it seemed only a matter of time before it would move on from the name.
"The recent social unrest in our community and our country has only underscored the need for us to keep improving as an organization on issues of social justice," the Indians said in July.
The Washington Football Team has shown this year that fully replacing a nickname takes time and requires many logistical considerations. Dan Snyder, Washington's owner, told The Wall Street Journal earlier this fall that the process is "truly a massive undertaking," involving the manufacturing of uniforms, merchandise, stadium signs and more.
Though Cleveland mostly phased out Chief Wahoo in 2019, merchandise with the logo continued to appear in stores at the ballpark and around Northeast Ohio. Chief Wahoo was demoted to a secondary logo for the 2014 season in favor of a block "C."
Cleveland has played nearly 17,000 games as the Indians over more than 100 years, winning six pennants — most recently in 2016, when they fell in the World Series to the Chicago Cubs in seven games — and two titles. Their last championship came in 1948, giving them the longest active drought of any team in the major leagues.
Native American nicknames in sports have been the subject of controversy for decades. Other franchises, including baseball's Atlanta Braves, the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs and the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks, have said recently that they have no plans to change their names. The issue has divided not just fans of professional and college teams, but individual towns that have high schools with Native American mascots.
As Cleveland begins its search for a new permanent name, one possibility that has emerged among fans digs deep into the city's baseball history. The Cleveland Spiders, the name Sockalexis played for, competed in the National League from 1889 through 1899. In their last season of existence, they went 20-134 — the worst record in major-league history.
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