The eyes of the nation are now upon us to see how our historic, barrier-breaking choice here in Virginia works out.
The election? Nah. I’m talking about something that’s apparently far more important*: the decision by the minor league baseball team in Salem to rename itself from the Salem Red Sox to the Salem RidgeYaks.
* Our story on the election prompted 76 comments on Facebook. Our story on the RidgeYaks generated 106 and counting.
Priding myself on having my ear to the ground, my finger on the pulse of public opinion and all that, I will accordingly shift my attention today from the serious business of dissecting last week’s election results to the apparently far more serious question of answering the question that now hangs over the Roanoke Valley like the haze on a hot, summer day: Just what the heck is a RidgeYak?
You think this is all silly, don’t you? I’m here to tell you otherwise.
This name is evidence of the Roanoke Valley’s changing image
There was a time when it seemed the basic rule was that any sports team in the Roanoke Valley had to invoke the region’s rail heritage. Once, we had a minor league hockey team called the Roanoke Express. We currently have a hockey team called the Rail Yard Dawgs. We once had a summer league team of college baseball players known as the Roanoke Rails.
While Roanoke is rightly proud of its heritage as a rail center, Salem isn’t Roanoke (anyone in Salem will be happy to remind you of that fact), and the railroad headquarters is long since gone from Roanoke anyway. Norfolk Southern isn’t even in Virginia anymore; it’s in Atlanta. Who knows how long it will even stay there? Union Pacific — based in Omaha — wants to buy Norfolk Southern. The regulatory process on that will take until at least 2027.
There’s been a decade-plus push to change the region’s identity from a rail center to an outdoors center. The naming of the RidgeYaks reflects that — the “yak” is supposed to have a double meaning with “kayak,” which is why the creature is shown paddling in a watercraft.
Fun fact: When the hockey team was being named, then-City Manager Chris Morrill suggested it be given a name to showcase Roanoke’s emerging role as a health care center, specifically the brain research being done at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. His proposed name: The Roanoke Brain Freeze, with the mascot being a skating brain.
When I strike it rich and buy the team, I can assure you this is happening.
Random Yak fact No. 1: Yak skiing
In the Indian hill resort of Manali, you can take part in what Time magazine calls “an implausible extreme sport”: yak skiing.
Here’s how it works: You stand at the bottom of the hill and tie yourself to a rope. The rope is attached, via a system of pulleys, to a hungry yak at the top of the hill. You are given a bucket of nuts to shake in the yak’s general direction. According to the BBC, “the beast charges down the mountain, pulling the skier upwards at terrifying speed.” And yes, people apparently pay good money for this sort of thing. Time says: “If you forget yourself in the excitement and shake the bucket too soon, you’ll be flattened by two hairy tons of behemoth.”
If the team doesn’t take advantage of some variation of this for one of those between-inning games, it’s missing the marketing opportunity of a lifetime.
Must team names be geographically appropriate? Many aren’t.
One of the criticisms of the new name on social media is that it’s not geographically appropriate: We don’t have yaks in these parts. That skips over the derivation of “yak” from “kayak,” but let’s pursue this.
Of the 30 Major League teams, 18 have names that are at least vaguely appropriate to their city. I’m being generous and counting the Philadelphia Phillies but not the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose nickname — originally the Trolley Dodgers — made sense in Brooklyn but not Chavez Ravine. So that’s 18-12.
In the National Football League, 17 of the 32 teams have a geographically-related name — so 17-15.
In the National Basketball Association, 17 of the 30 teams do — and I’m not counting the Utah Jazz or Los Angeles Lakers, whose names made more sense when they were in New Orleans and Minneapolis. So, 17-13.
In the National Hockey League, 15 of the 32 teams have geographical names, so 15-17.
So, no, there are no yaks roaming the Blue Ridge, but there are no bears in Chicago (or anywhere in Illinois, for that matter), and the only lions in Detroit are confined to the zoo. Does it matter if there are no yaks in residence in the Roanoke Valley?
Fun fact: Of 30 Major League Baseball teams, only two are named after a mammal and one of those is the Detroit Tigers. Tigers are also an Asian species. Why are tigers acceptable in Detroit but yaks aren’t in Salem?
Random Yak fact No. 2: Yaks would make good pinch runners
Yaks can run 20-25 mph. That’s a little faster than top baseball players, who can reach 20 mph or so while sprinting the bases. This opens up some baseball strategy: Late in the game, when the team needs a run, it needs to send in a yak as a pinch runner. That would make plays at the plate a lot more interesting, too.
The team name is unusual because it promotes another sport
The RidgeYaks name comes from “kayak” and the logo depicts the yak with an oar — and, just to be careful, a safety vest. Across the “big four” team sports — baseball, basketball, football and hockey — no other team name references another sport. I skip over Major League Soccer because it has too many team names that adopt the European convention of being called “Charlotte FC” for football club. Sports teams should have proper naming conventions — a city or geographic region followed by a nickname. The LA Galaxy is great, but what the heck is Sporting Kansas City?
Anyway, the RidgeYaks may be the only member of their cross-promotional sports species.
Random Yak fact No. 3: Yak polo
Just like regular polo, except with yaks instead of horses. This variation is popular in the Pamir plateau of Pakistan. The Chitral News in Pakistan says it’s pretty much the same as horse polo except “the Yaks being heavy, clumsy and difficult to steer the game becomes more demanding in its own way.”
Yak polo is also played in Mongolia.
Why don’t we have yak polo? Asking for a friend.
The name reflects a team naming trend: More modifiers
Why RidgeYaks and not just Yaks? This matches a trend where a noun is added to modify another noun. We see this a lot in hockey with the word “ice.” The Southern Professional Hockey League, in which Roanoke plays, has the Knoxville Ice Bears and the Pensacola Ice Flyers. Just down the road, the Appalachian League team in Pulaski is called the River Turtles rather than just plain Turtles. Would the social media reaction be more positive or less positive if the team were simply the Salem Yaks? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. Or you can fill out this form here as part of our Cardinal Way project to promote civil discussions. Yes, even about sports nicknames.
Random Yak fact No. 4: Yaks are a source of energy
Yak droppings are a source of fuel in Tibet. “When you travel to Tibet, you can still see stacks of yak dung cakes in villages or herders’ homes,” Travel Digest says. This is a form of biomass. Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger has said she’d like to promote more use of biomass as part of a larger plan to increase energy production, but she probably doesn’t have yak dung in mind.
Probably just as well: It’s said to be low in mass-to-energy ratio and produces a lot of carbon emissions. Science Daily says that a study in Tibet “showed that the average concentrations for black carbon and fine particulate matter were nearly double those reported by some similar studies of households in areas of lower altitude and warmer climates, such as India and Mexico.”
The name reflects a design trend: Smooshing words together
You’ll notice that the team is the RidgeYaks and not Ridge Yaks. This is the kind of thing that drives grammarians nuts. It’s a thing, though: We have YouTube and eBay. We have PayPal and MasterCard. We have iPhones and iPads. PlayStation and SportsCenter. We have ConAgra and DreamWorks and FedEx and HarperCollins and LinkedIn and PowerPoint and, well, the list goes on. The world of minor league baseball already has the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders and the Midland RockHounds. Now the Salem RidgeYaks join the list.
The particular design style where the space between two words is eliminated is called CamelCase because it creates a camel-like “hump.” It came out of the world of technology because omitting the space makes coding easier. Marketers love CamelCase — they consider it bold and creative. Copy editors hate it. You can see who rules the world.
Random Yak fact No. 5: Yak racing
If you can ride it, you can race it. And people do. Yak racing exists across parts of China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. A Chinese cultural website says that “Every yak is dressed up beautifully before race: it has red tassels on the head, colorful silk on the horns, gaily-colored ribbons on the ears and the fan-shaped Tibetan patterns on the tail.” The site also advises that “The yak that wins in the race is famous in the locals and enjoys special treatment from his master.”
Virginia has horse racing at Colonial Downs, but not a single yak racing venue. This seems an opportunity.
The logo leaves out the Eastern Shore
One of the many new logos shows an outline of Virginia — minus its two easternmost counties. General Manager Allen Lawrence says this was intentional: “While the Eastern Shore looks great on paper/graphics, it is nearly impossible to embroider. If they do, it just looks like a dot of thread and almost looks like there is a flaw in the garment. Because of trademark issues, we cannot use the Eastern Shore on one thing and not on the other. It’s all or nothing.”
Fortunately, the RidgeYaks don’t have many season ticket holders from the Eastern Shore. “We get left off more than we get included on the maps of Virginia,” says Del. Rob Bloxom, R-Accomack County, via email. “We don’t like it but we are accustomed to it. I try to remind people of their error and use it to my advantage in Richmond lol.”
State Sen. Bill DeSteph, R-Virginia Beach, who represents the Eastern Shore counties in the Senate, says a few years ago that even a new logo for the state Senate left off that part of Virginia. “I made ’em put it back on,” he says.
Ted Shockley, editor of the Eastern Shore Post, emails me that, “Some on the Eastern Shore take umbrage at the continuous map omissions. It also provokes hand-wringing from those promoting Eastern Shore tourism. Others among us would never stoop so low as to beg connection with the Virginia mainland. It’s not as bad as being geographically affixed to Maryland, but a true Eastern Shore native wants little association with hills, mountains, Northern Virginia, Richmond politics, or interstate driving, and appreciates the moat God provided with the Chesapeake Bay.”
He also notes that when Ralph Northam, an Eastern Shore native, was governor, he presented a new map to the McDonald’s in the town of Onley because the one the stores had had a map that left out the shore.
Perhaps those counties should rebrand themselves with CamelCase as EasternShore.
Random Yak fact No. 6: Yak blood is said to have medicinal value
This is an actual story from The Kathmandu Post: “Hordes of people have been arriving at Boksikhola of Mustang district to partake in raw blood drinking festival of yak . . . It is believed that drinking the raw yak blood cures gastritis, jaundice and skin diseases, and relieves body sprain and swelling.”
No yaks are killed during this festival; a maximum of five glasses’ worth of yak blood is drained from each animal. “A glass full of yak blood is sold for Rs 150,” the paper said, referring to the Nepali rupee. Based on the currency exchange rate, you can knock that back for $1.06.
If some ballplayer with a muscle strain decides some yak blood would get him off the injured list more quickly, don’t blame me.
That’s not a local mountain
The video introducing the name begins with a scene of mountains and a recitation about “Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Home to rolling rivers, iconic peaks …” Just not those particular peaks. Lawrence confirmed they aren’t ours: “These are not local mountains. No one had good footage so we used this for the sake of the video.”
This is also how we get pitch clocks, ghost runners on second and robot umpires.
Random Yak fact No. 7: Yak cheese
Yaks are a species of cattle, so yes, you can milk them. This is often turned into cheese and butter, the latter of which often goes into “butter tea,” a popular drink in Tibet. Flavor and Fortune describes the custom of drinking butter tea this way: “No matter the age, everyone drinks several cups of butter-tea in the morning. With each sip, custom dictates the host refill the cup never leaving it empty. They also drink about the same amount in the evening …”
Yak butter tea is said to have “an oily and fatty texture which coated our mouths.”
Surely we can make a case for this as a concession stand item, right?
You’ve been Lynchburged
In late 2015, the Commonwealth Games — think an amateur level of the Olympics — announced it was moving from Roanoke to Lynchburg. This came as a great surprise to the Star City and was considered quite the coup in the Hill City, where the vice mayor at the time, Ceasor Johnson, chortled: “You’ve been Lynchburged.”
Over the weekend, Lynchburg council member Chris Faraldi, an avid baseball fan, posted a jocular open letter to “friends and baseball fans in the Roanoke Valley.”
“Now, I’m not one to criticize our friends down I-81,” Faraldi wrote, “but I do have questions. What exactly is a Ridge Yak? Where does one find these creatures in the valleys of Southwest Virginia? And most importantly, why would anyone retire a perfectly good dog for a … well, whatever that is?”
He went on to invite disgruntled Salem fans to join him at Lynchburg Hillcats games.
“We’re just 50 miles up the road, and we promise you the following:
A mascot that makes geographical sense (we actually have hills)
No sudden rebranding away from years of tradition
The same single-A Carolina League baseball you’ve come to love
Significantly fewer yaks.”
There’s no crying in baseball, but there are good rivalries. If these two teams can’t come up with some rivalry between the mascots, Southpaw the Hillcat and Mac the Yak, they need to get sent to the showers.
Random Yak fact No. 8: Yak movie was an Oscar nominee
“Luana: A Yak in the Classroom” was a 2019 movie by the Bhutanese director Pawo Choyning Dorji. It deals with a teacher assigned to a remote village who meets a woman who sings a song from the perspective of a yak about to be slaughtered. It was nominated for an Oscar as Best International Film but did not win.
Mugsy is out of work
Mugsy is the beloved dog mascot that has endured in Salem through the years. He was introduced in 1997, when the team was known as the Salem Avalanche. That’s a 28-year run. The median job tenure in the United States is 3.9 years, down from a peak of 4.6 years in 2012-14, but still higher than the 3.4 years it was in 1987.
Mugsy didn’t lose his job to technological change; he just lost it to a younger mascot. Virginia is an at-will employment state, so the team can let Mugsy go anytime it wants, although a good lawyer might make the case that there’s some age discrimination involved here. That will be tough to prove, though, because the nature of the job changed. Mugsy couldn’t very well be a yak.
Big Lick Brewing in Roanoke is sponsoring an event on Saturday that it’s billing as a “memorial and celebration of life” for Mugsy. However, I’ve seen no death certificate. Until I see one, it appears more likely that Mugsy is simply unemployed. The U.S. Department of Labor says that the average worker will change careers five to seven times over the course of their working life — and that 30% of the workforce now changes careers every 12 months. Mugsy now joins that line.
You know who should pick up Mugsy’s contract? Virginia Western Community College — to highlight the role it plays in helping career-switchers pick up new skills.
Random Yak fact No. 9: Yak mating call featured in ‘Ace Ventura’
In the movie “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls,” there’s a scene where Jim Carrey’s character demonstrates a yak mating call to a fellow passenger on the plane. The Salem team should be doing everything it can to secure the rights to use that scene for special promotions during a game. Team’s down and needs a rally? Yak mating call time!
The game is scored by merch sales, not social media posts
The reaction on social media to the new name has been, shall we say, spirited.
Overwhelmingly negative would be another way to describe it. That is also often the nature of social media. A study by the international social media marketing firm Mention found that negative comments started to outweigh positive ones in 2017. “Between 2013 and 2017, social media users went from largely upbeat, to feeling blue,” the Mention report says. Comments originating from the United States are particularly negative, the report said. Canadian comments are 2-1 positive; American ones are more negative than positive. If this Salem team were in Salem, Ontario, or Salem, Nova Scotia, they’d be raving over the RidgeYaks. We surly Americans are more likely to vent. About anything.
I hate to break it to people commenting on social media, but that’s not how this particular game is scored. The Salem Red Sox changed their name for one reason: To sell more merchandise. You can buy Red Sox gear all over the interwebs, but if you want a Yak shirt, you have to go through the Salem RidgeYaks. And people are.
On Saturday night, “the line for the team store was out the door. In the first 12-15 hours, we have already sold merch in 20 different states,” Lawrence said in an email on Sunday. “The goal is 50!!” By Monday, the team had shipped out merch to 27 states. That’s “ just something we have not been accustomed to do,” he said. The new name seems to be a win at the cash register, which is the only scoreboard that matters.
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