Salem’s minor league baseball team is about to change its sox.
This will be the last season the team will be known as the Salem Red Sox. Come next year, the team will be called … well, we don’t know yet.
The new name hasn’t been picked yet, although a small group of team officials knows which names are the finalists. The announcement won’t come until after the season is over.
When Salem shucks off its Red Sox name and logo, it will join a long and growing list of minor league teams that have traded the name of their Major League affiliate for something unique — and for which the team can make a lot more money selling merchandise.
Like many things in life, this is all about money.
“I grew up a Red Sox fan,” says team General Manager Allen Lawrence. “When we became the Red Sox in 2009 nobody thought that was cooler than me. In the early stages of our life, there were a lot of benefits to it. There was no question who we were affiliated with. The Red Sox are one of the biggest brands in the world.”
Here’s the downside: The Salem team doesn’t really make much money selling merchandise. If you just want a T-shirt or hat that says “Red Sox,” you don’t need to go through the team. You can buy those almost anywhere, and that licensing money eventually finds its way back to Fenway Park in Boston to help pay the $27 million that Rafael Devers will make this year, even if he’s only playing half the game as a designated hitter. Not that many people really want merchandise that specifically says “Salem” on it. “The only people buying Salem Red Sox merchandise outside this market are family members of the players, and that’s pretty limited,” Lawrence says.
The key words there are “outside this market.”
These days, sports teams strive to cash in far beyond their own ballpark. The Sports Business Journal reports that the Atlanta Braves get about 8% of their revenue from merchandise sales. For minor league teams, who don’t have fat TV contracts, merch sales become even more important (we just don’t know how important because, unlike the Braves, they’re not publicly traded). Lawrence says Salem’s goal with the name change is to double its merchandise sales.
When the Danville Otterbots, a summer league team for college players, announced its unusual name in 2021, it quickly sold merchandise to 50 states — and countries as far away as Australia.
“All I can say is, and I’m not lying, it took close to 48 hours to pack up the merchandise orders that came in just in the 18 hours after the brand announcement and ship them out,” the team’s general manager said then.
When the Danville Dairy Daddies, another college-level team in a different league, came out with its unusual name in 2024, same thing. Fifty states and ka-ching!
Same with the Burlington Sock Puppets in North Carolina; the Rocket City Trash Pandas in Madison, Alabama; the Hartford Yard Goats in Connecticut; the Amarillo Sod Poodles in Texas and … well, it’s a very long list. Over the years, but particularly in recent ones, minor league teams have moved to cash in with unique names that can help them sell merchandise — not just in the stadium but around the country and even around the world. As recently as 2019, the last year that the Appalachian League existed as a minor league before converting to a college-level league, all 10 teams were named after their Major League affiliates. Now, somebody in Australia has Danville Otterbots gear. Of the 120 minor league teams formally affiliated with Major League counterparts, only 11 still bear the names of their big league team. Next year, when the Salem team takes the field as whatever the Salem team will be called, there will be 10 (or fewer, if others change their names).
The impetus for changing the team’s name began six years ago. Back in 2019, the Salem Red Sox adopted an “alternate ID” for home games on Thursday nights, the traditional cheap beer night. In a nod to the growing number of breweries in the Roanoke Valley, the team that plays on those Thirsty Thursdays is known as the Salem Beermongers.
“It really kind of took off,” Lawrence says. “We sold merchandise in 44 states in a very short period of time. We thought, ‘This is cool. We’ve never done that.’”
Even now, Salem still sometimes makes the highly rated Sports Center on ESPN for the Beermongers when the network needs something light. “They’re never going to feature the Salem Red Sox,” Lawrence says. “There’s no uniqueness to the logo. They’ll choose the [Akron] Rubber Ducks or the Trash Pandas or the [Richmond] Flying Squirrels before they land on the Red Sox.”
And all those national network appearances, however brief, are essentially free commercials for fans to buy merchandise with an unusual name or logo or both — so the gimmicky promotion with the alternate ID of the Beermongers has led to a wholesale renaming.
The process of renaming a team is not as simple as you might think. When the Arizona Coyotes of the National Hockey League moved to Salt Lake City, the team spent a season as the Utah Hockey Club because it took that long to work through trademark issues. One fan favorite — the Yetis — got nixed because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office said that was too close to the Yeti brand of water coolers. Instead, the team recently announced it would become the Utah Mammoth. Extinct ice age beasts can’t sue for trademark infringement, but they look really cool on a logo.
Lawrence explains that many of the decisions related to a new name don’t have much to do with the name itself but things such as: “What would be fun? What would the mascot look like? Can it be easily embroidered? Can it look good on a T-shirt?” Lawrence likened the process to naming a child. “What will kids in school 10 years from now rhyme his name with that could be made fun of?”
Part of the goal is to find a name that is “unique to the area.” Some of the new-fangled names for minor league teams play off their location: the Augusta (Georgia) Green Jackets are a reference to the Masters golf tournament, the Lansing Lugnuts are a nod to Michigan’s auto industry, the Altoona Curve to a famous railroad bend in Pennsylvania. Closer to home, Salem’s Carolina League rivals down U.S. 460 are the Lynchburg Hillcats, which plays off that city’s nickname as the Hill City. On the other side of the state, the minor league team in Norfolk is the Tides, which seems self-explanatory for a port city.
“You want to have your own identity,” Lawrence says. “Salem Red Sox doesn’t scream ‘minor league.’ There are so many names out there that are unique and fun but also relate to the market. We didn’t check either of those boxes.”
The team contracted with the Atlanta-based Collegiate Licensing Company to come up with a new name. “They did a lot of research,” Lawrence says. A lot of that has revolved around the outdoors, an asset that the Roanoke Valley has pushed in recent years. “They came up with a few different ideas,” Lawrence says. “We’ve honed in on one that we think it is a little bit stronger than the others” — but, naturally, he’s not giving it away.
All the names and logos under consideration have been sent to Major League Baseball for approval. “They did make one small suggestion to one name we were considering.” Otherwise, they have all been cleared. No Yeti problems yet.
One question is whether “Salem” stays in the name. Since minor league baseball arrived in Salem in 1955 — this year marks 70 years — the nicknames have changed, but the teams have always been the Salem This or the Salem That. Never Roanoke Valley. Not Blue Ridge. Not Virginia. And definitely not Roanoke. If you know anything about the Roanoke Valley, you know why. Salem is Salem, and Salem is very proud of being Salem.
There’s no language in the team’s contract with Salem that requires the team to bear the name “Salem,” although it’s safe to say that the city feels very strongly that it should. There is a trend toward regional names or using city nicknames. The Kinston Indians in North Carolina became the Carolina Mudcats, then became the Down East Wood Ducks before moving to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to become the Hub City Spartanburgers.
Ultimately, though, we come back to the M word — or maybe two M words: marketing and money. Whatever the name is, Lawrence says, the biggest consideration is “can we sell it in this area but also sell nationally and get some legs behind?”
Here’s where things can get tricky. The team conducted focus groups with season-ticket holders, sponsors and others who might be considered “community stakeholders.” One concern some had, he says, was, “Why would you change from the Red Sox? That’s such a powerful brand? What if you changed it to something stupid?”
What’s stupid, though, is often open to debate, especially where the cash register is concerned.
Almost a decade ago, the new collegiate summer league team in Savannah, Georgia, needed a name. Those chose “Bananas,” thinking that was funny and kind of rhymed. It also took off in such unexpected ways that the Savannah Bananas have now evolved into an independent, barnstorming novelty team, similar to the Harlem Globetrotters. They’ve also become a cash machine that some speculate is worth $1 billion.
“There’s not a name more stupid than the Bananas and they’re selling more merchandise than some Major League teams,” Lawrence says.
So what will Salem’s new name be? All we know is what it won’t be. It won’t be the Bananas. That’s already taken.
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