The secret was as closely guarded as the gold in Fort Knox.
But Saturday, the Yak was finally out of the bag.
Salem’s Class A minor league baseball franchise, known since 2009 as the Red Sox, ended more than a year of speculation by revealing its new nickname.
Say hello to the Salem RidgeYaks.
The rebrand of the Roanoke Valley’s Carolina League team — which for seven decades also has been known as the Rebels, Pirates, Redbirds, Buccaneers or Avalanche — was nearly two years in the making.
It culminated in a ceremony open to the public Saturday at Salem Memorial Ballpark that drew several hundred curious onlookers.
And when the team’s new name was unveiled via a video on the stadium’s video board, the Salem RidgeYaks officially joined the likes of the Amarillo Sod Poodles, the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs and the Rocket City Trash Pandas as brands far removed from the names of their respective Major League affiliates.
So what’s in it for Salem?
“A lot of people have asked us ‘Why?'” Salem team general manager Allen Lawrence said. “Why in the world would we rebrand from the Salem Red Sox? The Red Sox are one of the most recognizable, iconic and successful brands, not only in baseball but in sports throughout the world.
“It’s very simple. Every great business evolves, and that’s what we’re doing here.”
New team logos; new team colors; blue, gold, silver and red; new team uniforms and a new mascot, Mac the Yak, also were unveiled Saturday during the 2 1/2-hour ceremony where fans were allowed to picnic and cavort on the infield grass of the playing field.
Not long after the unveiling, fans were lined up at a makeshift team store on the concourse to purchase team hats and jerseys.
Salem assistant general manager Blair Hoke said the local club expects to benefit from the new identity by selling more merchandise and season tickets.
“Change can be scary, but change is good,” Hoke said. “Anyone that is familiar with the minor league landscape knows that it is not the norm to remain with the parent-club name anymore.”
Salem is hardly alone in the Carolina League in developing a unique nickname. Only one of the league’s clubs, the Fredericksburg Nationals, maintains the same nickname held by its parent organization.
Two of Boston’s other affiliates — the High-A Greenville (S.C.) Drive and the Double-A Portland (Maine) Sea Dogs — do not carry the Red Sox nickname.
While Lawrence stressed that Salem’s affiliation with the Boston Red Sox remains solid, the 25-year team employee and longtime Roanoke Valley resident said the Sox nickname had run its course.
“It was just time to do it. That is the direction that minor league baseball is going,” Lawrence said. “We felt like it was a disservice to this area, and to the people in this community, to not change the name and to reflect it in a way that is close-knit to this area.
“Merchandise sales is a part of it. We’ve got a lot of Yankees fans and Cubs fans and Dodgers fans and Orioles fans that come out to the ballpark every night, and they were a little hesitant to wear ‘Red Sox’ across their chests. We struggled being the Red Sox here in Southwest Virginia. The Red Sox are still iconic. Now we’re moving on. We’re flipping the page.”
So why “RidgeYaks” exactly?
Lawrence said the club worked with Learfield Creative, the branding division of a major marketing company, consulted with local financial stakeholders and sponsors and conducted fan surveys to develop the new nickname.
He said “RidgeYaks” was not the only possibility.
“There were a couple names,” he said. “This is the one we gravitated to. We loved this one from the get-go. We fine-tuned it a little bit and we came up with what we have today.”
Lawrence said the primary logo — a menacing yak depicted with a half-oar, half-baseball bat in its mouth and a ball impaled by one of its horns — was crafted to represent the Blue Ridge Mountains and the area’s reputation for hiking, cycling and kayaking.
The yak represents “strength, resilience and hard-working spirit that our players and community are so well-known for. The yak has a double meaning. A yak in baseball is a home run,” Lawrence said.
Secondary team logos incorporate the Roanoke Star and a silhouette of the Commonwealth of Virginia, albeit minus the Eastern Shore.
“There’s over 40 Salems throughout the country,” Lawrence said. “Being a Red Sox affiliate we get mixed up all the time by people thinking we’re in Salem, Massachusetts. We wanted to eliminate that by bringing the state of Virginia into it.”
The Salem team is owned by Diamond Baseball Holdings, which owns 45 minor league teams. The ownership group gave its blessing for the name change in 2023. Boston Red Sox president Sam Kennedy offered his blessing in a recorded message Saturday on the stadium video board.
“This took a lot of time,” Hoke said. “This was not something that was just thrown against the wall.”
While longtime team mascot Mugsy might be out of a job now, Hoke expects local baseball fans to be on board with the changes when the Salem RidgeYaks open the 2026 Carolina League season at home April 2.
“This ballpark is such a blessing to our community,” she said. “For us to have a brand that’s fun, exciting, unique, quirky, but has a story to tell, a story that’s a timeless brand.”
