TinCaps? Just give it some time
Yeah, well … 90 percent of New England probably thought “Red Sox” sounded dumb the first time they heard it, too.
Best comeback I’ve got right now.
Best response, on short notice, to those of you who decided five seconds after hearing it that “TinCaps” was the Worst Nickname Ever – and this in a world that includes various and sundry Storms, Xplosions and even a Crew (the Columbus Crew in Major League Soccer, which I’ve always thought should have a feeder team called the Bunch).
But TinCaps?
Tell me that won’t immediately become “Potheads.”
Tell me, too, how it’s any dopier than “Red Sox” or “White Sox” or any other nickname we’ve all come to regard as iconic over the years. I still get amused snickers when I try to explain Komets-with-a-K to people outside the Midwest. And you just know there were piles of folks in Toledo wondering what the heck kind of nickname “Mud Hens” was the first time they heard it.
Today, of course, the Toledo Mud Hens is one of the most famous names in minor-league sports. And the Lansing Lugnuts, another nickname no doubt considered stupid at first, is one of the best-selling minor-league licensees of all time. And the Montgomery Biscuits … well, I bring them up because, really, how do you not like a team named the “Biscuits”?
Someday I’ll own a Biscuits cap to go with the Lugnuts cap I already own. And someday you’ll all be wearing TinCaps, um, caps, because the logo (Sneering Apple Guy, I call him) is at least sort of cool.
Is it the coolest logo ever?
No.
Is TinCaps the coolest nickname ever?
Not even close. It’s not even historically accurate, because its attempt to evoke Johnny Appleseed wearing a tin pot on his head is doomed by the fact Johnny Appleseed probably never wore a tin pot on his head.
On the other hand, here is what “TinCaps” has going for it:
1. Nobody else has it.
Sure, the West Michigan Whitecaps come close. But TinCaps? It’s as off-the-wall as Biscuits, Lugnuts or the best nickname of all time, the late, great Grrreenville Grrrowl of the ECHL.
2. Unlike the Wizards, it’s got something to do with the city and its history.
It’s also not generic and/or repetitive (how many Generals and Falcons do we need?), potentially hurtful (imagine justifying Flood after, well, a flood) or impossible to depict as an inoffensive mascot (which would be the case if the team were named for former Mayor Harry Baals).
3. The logo is sort of cool.
Oh, wait. I already said that.
But it bears repeating, because the logo is the brand here, and it’s all about branding these days. And TinCaps is a brand you can sell, because it’s quirky and different and consumers, especially young consumers, go for quirky and different. How else do you explain Safety-Pylon Orange Crocs?
“There were a whole lot of names,” Jason Frier of Hardball Capital said Thursday. “I really hoped that the second we did this, we’d leaf through these names and something would jump out and we’d say ‘That’s it.’ Didn’t happen. It very, very rarely if ever happens that something jumps out at you and you have that instant winner.”
TinCaps wasn’t an instant winner with everyone Thursday. But give it six months. It’ll grow on ’em like every nickname since the beginning of time eventually grows on people.
I imagine, for instance, that the diehards in New York hated it when their beloved Highlanders finally changed their name officially in the early 1900s.
The new name?
“Yankees.”
So he doffed his cap and he cried and, after one last Loserville moment, Lou Piniella put both the game and Chicago behind him, leaving the Cubs to their usual fate.