From Dairy Daddies to Trash Pandas: Small-town teams are conjuring fans with offbeat brands

When McCreamy, the muscular mascot of the Danville Dairy Daddies, was unveiled, it was no accident. The collegiate summer baseball team in Virginia knew exactly what it was doing.

There was a story behind the team’s name, a thought process behind its color palette and an award-winning designer behind its logo. Such is the case for many of the teams with eccentric names in the minors and collegiate summer leagues in recent years. The magic lies in the quirks that tie the clubs to their communities.

That is how a topless bull came to represent a team in Pittsylvania County, which has three of the five largest dairy farms in Virginia. “Dairy Daddies” was initially suggested to general manager Austin Scher as a potential name for Danville’s first collegiate summer team, the Otterbots, in 2021. Over the next three years, the alliteration stuck in Scher’s head.

“While it is quirky and silly and somewhat tongue in cheek, there is a very real community connection,” Scher said. “The blue and pink are designed to elicit feelings of newness, of birth, of rebirth. You see those two colors together and you might think of a gender reveal party or a nursery. Then you look at this muscle-bound cow, and you’re thinking: ‘Well, that’s not a baby. That’s very much full grown.’ Danville and all of southern Virginia are in the middle of this massive resurgence.”

The Dairy Daddies are just the latest in a long line of lower-league baseball teams that shirk traditional names in favor of more eye-catching identities. The recent surge of silliness stems in part from Major League Baseball’s downsizing of the affiliated minor leagues from 163 teams to 120.

Forty-three franchises lost their affiliation in 2020. Many of those teams played under the same names as their former MLB parent clubs and had to rebrand. Former rookie league teams like the Burlington (North Carolina) Royals and Pulaski (Virginia) Yankees reemerged as the Sock Puppets and River Turtles to play collegiate summer ball in the Appalachian League.

Teams that maintained their MLB affiliations have also jumped on the funky name train with hopes of invigorating their brands. Pick nearly any league, at any level, and there is a nickname or logo that will make you stop and gawk: the Carolina Disco Turkeys; the Montgomery (Alabama) Biscuits; the Minot (North Dakota) Hot Tots; the Rocket City (Alabama) Trash Pandas; the Wichita Chili Buns.

Even with a local connection, an unusual name can take time to accept. Take the Jacksonville (Florida) Jumbo Shrimp. The Miami Marlins’ Class AAA affiliate played as the Suns from 1990 to 2016, when new ownership took over. Though the new team name has a tie-in to the local shrimping industry, the public was not immediately sold.

Noel Blaha, Jacksonville’s vice president for marketing and media, said the antipathy was expected and they planned the reveal accordingly.

“We very purposefully had some elementary school kids in the front row of the press conference because if things turned sideways and people were throwing tomatoes, they weren’t going to go after the kids,” he said.

Slowly, the tide turned.

“What it resulted in was incredible merchandise sales in the months leading up to the start of the season, and then the season started and we set an attendance record that weekend,” he said.

The DubSea (Washington) Fish Sticks, previously the Highline Bears, experienced the same rejection and resurgence after their new identity won an online poll pitting Fish Sticks against Seal Slingers.

“I had zero people get angry about the name the Highline Bears. I also had zero people get excited about it,” the team president, Justin Moser, said. “Before we rebranded, I don’t think we ever sold anything online.”

Despite social media comments calling the new name stupid and “a disgrace to the area,” the Fish Sticks have since shipped orders to all 50 states and nine countries. They recorded five capacity crowds last summer and announced that their June 1 season opener sold out April 23.

These days, teams that are not getting creative with branding can seem a bit stale, said Paul Caputo, host of the “Baseball by Design” podcast, which explores the origin stories for minor-league nicknames.

“Being named for a local animal just feels very 1990s,” he added. “It feels old.”

That’s where sports branding companies come in. In the minor league baseball space, there are two heavy hitters responsible for most of the new, splashy nicknames: Brandiose and Studio Simon. Team staff members work with designers to brainstorm an identity linked to the local history or traditions.

“Every community has a story waiting to be told, and the goal is that when you visit a sports experience, particularly in minor league baseball, we want you to step into a whole other world,” a Brandiose founder, Jason Klein, said. “We want you to step into a story, a nine-inning vacation, as we call it. But that story is the story of your hometown.”

Anchoring each team’s story is its logo, the main character of the narrative. Amarillo Sod Poodles general manager Tony Ensor knew that nailing his Texas League team’s logo would be the key to winning over naysayers, so he went to Brandiose with detailed instructions.

“I want the mouth to be John Wayne,” he said of the animated black-tailed prairie dog, “and the eyes to be Clint Eastwood.”

Scher, the Dairy Daddies’ general manager, had similarly specific requests for Studio Simon’s creative director, Dan Simon, when molding McCreamy. Simon envisioned the bull as having a dad bod. The response was a swift no.

“They wanted him built but not Arnold Schwarzenegger-built. He’s fine-tuned,” Simon said. “This cow was going to be kind of a ladies’ man. Or, in this case, a male cow is a bull. So he’s a cow’s man.”

These flirty, wacky, happy characters do get some blowback for deviating from traditional logos.

But Simon, Klein and the teams that proudly play as Sock Puppets, Trash Pandas and Sod Poodles shrug off that notion.

“The sports fans are going to go to the games anyway,” Simon said. “These identities are drawing people who wouldn’t otherwise come, and hopefully when they do come, they go: ‘Hey, this was fun! I’m going to come again!’ “

The players, whether they are college athletes trying to get on scouts’ radars or minor leaguers assigned to the clubs by their MLB organizations, also benefit from the increased exposure and engaged crowds.

“I’ve heard from several players that it’s like a little taste of the majors before you actually make it to the show,” Ricky Fernandez, the director of marketing for the Trash Pandas, said.

“The old team we had before they moved, we were getting like 200, 300 people a game. It was kind of sad to be at a game because there’d be so many empty seats. Here we’ve led the league in attendance every single season. We average 5,000 people a night.”

Los Angeles Angels shortstop Zach Neto, who played 37 games for Rocket City, based in Madison, Alabama, on his path to the majors, had a pair of custom Trash Panda cleats made and said he still wears team merchandise.

“We got to play there in an awesome atmosphere every night,” he said.

“Even to this day, I still see myself as a Trash Panda.”

East Carolina catcher Ryan McCrystal, who spent the past two summers as a Burlington Sock Puppet, said the North Carolina community embraced the players, but he admitted it could take some effort to convince friends and family he was playing for a real team.

“They think it’s a joke, but I think it’s really cool because it’s easier to rally around a team with that kind of name,” he said. “It’s easier to build up a community around a team name that is something that brings people together. It’s the only sport that you can really do it where it makes sense. It’s something small but beautiful about the game.”