Game 39: Twins at Guardians

I remember this guy! (Photo by Nick Cammett/Diamond Images via Getty Images) | Diamond Images/Getty Images

Time: 6:15 Central

Weather: Showers likely after 8PM local, 61°

Opponent’s SB site: Covering the Corner

TV: Steve Wozniak Streamer. Radio: What DOES Gladden do during road trips? Gardening. I’ll bet it’s gardening

Tonight’s Cleveland starter, Parker Messick, was born 12 days before the 2000 elections. (I so Old.) He was drafted in 2022, and made his MLB debut last year; that’s pretty good. (Messick currently has the lowest ERA of any starter on the Guardians’ staff.) He throws around 93, uses changeups a lot, and mixes in a slider/curve sinker. The fastballs and his curve/slider are his best pitches. Here’s hoping Connor Prielipp will be good for Our Side.

I’m just gonna empty out some of my “it’s about Cleveland” notes today.

First, this story from last season about Guardians relief pitcher Nic Enright, who in the minors in 2022 discovered a nasty growth on his neck. It was cancer; he was treated, and made his MLB debut last year. 27 games with a 2.03 ERA before he had the dreaded TJ surgery; the Guardians cut him in December. Toronto picked him up, and he’s hoping for a comeback in 2027. If there’s baseball in 2027.

Are the Guardians asking for taxpayer stadium money? Are they an American professional sports team? If one is true, so must the other be. It’s less money than most teams want.

Back in 2024, SSS’s Brian O’Neill did an excellent, all-too-brief series on Ook Things About Other Teams (past and present), and this post is about dingbats who got their undies in a twist over the change of the team name from Generic Ethnicity to “Guardians.” I admit, I’m not crazy about Guardians either (I would have gone with Eries/Eeries and had a ghost-themed mascot), but it is an improvement.

Especially because there are no federally-recognized Native tribes in Ohio. There are Native people, of course. But most of the tribal communities in Ohio were forced out in the decades after the Revolutionary War. You can read a good, short article about this by Jessie Walton at the Midstory website. In some instances, the Natives who managed to avoid removal and/or their descendants were simply not recorded by the federal government.

In any case, naming your team “Indians” after the Natives were shoved out is like if California used federal help to cut down all the great pines and then started naming teams “Redwoods.” Although that would be less mean.

O’Neill’s post links to this excellent article by Brad Ricca of RustBelt magazine, where Ricca traces the history of the name and of the “Chief Wahoo” logo/mascot. Essentially, the team later liked to claim the name was a tribute to former Cleveland Spiders outfielder Louis Sockalexis, a Native American from the Penobscot tribe. That’s bunk. Reporters of the day frequently mocked Sockalexis’s heritage both when he did well and when he struggled, using terms like “war paint” and “wampum,” and Ricca gives multiple examples. The team name was likely copying the successful Boston Braves, the same way that once one team got named after stocking/sox color, others followed.

Ricca also traces the caricatures that eventually were the basis of the “Chief Wahoo” logo/mascot, first officially adopted by the team in 1947, after owner Bill Veeck commissioned a “fun” logo (a 17-year-old came up with it, and the artwork of 17-year-olds, much like A.I., will usually be very derivative of what they’ve already seen). Some team fans were even more attached to the racist logo than the historically inaccurate team name; this article points out how passionate some fans were about the logo, despite the fact that for the majority of the years the logo was officially used, the team stank. They stank so much there was a popular Charlie Sheen/Wesley Snipes movie about how the team generally stank.

O’Neill’s point is finally about how jerks clung to these things to announce to the universe that they were jerks, and I agree. If the Twins changed their logo from the cool TC one to some new, City Connect-designed stupid one, I’d never wear anything with the new logo, and I’d say the team was run by idiots (as opposed to how much I usually praise the team’s front office). I wouldn’t get personally affronted about it, I’d just think it was dumb. The people who clung to the old name/logo WERE personally affronted. Because they are buttheads.

It’s not an important part of Yuck Team History to chew on, I just thought O’Neill did a good job of it, and I don’t think I ever got around to praising/recommending his post. What’s vastly more important, historically, is something you can read the great Heather Cox Richardson about. How in 1947, the year the Wahoo logo was officially adopted by the team, Native Americans in Ohio or elsewhere couldn’t even vote. How it was the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 which finally solidified that right to vote… and now that Act is all but destroyed. That’s a bigger deal than Yuck Team History. But it’s still a good O’Neill post.

Finally, my best wishes to Moon Bo-gyeong, who stepped on a ball that had just deflected off his glove, twisted his left ankle, and is expected to miss several weeks. That’s a blow to his team, who are hoping to defend their 2025 title; they currently sit at 21-12, 1.0 GB.

His team is the LG Twins based in Seoul, South Korea. And the reason I know these things is because my phone’s News app follows the “Minnesota Twins.” So I occasionally get updates about… the LG Twins. That’s alright; I’d rather see those than more clickbait “Buxton trade proposal” articles. Still, you hate to see this at the bottom of a post:

“This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.”

Suuuuure, they are. Oh, well.