The Fort Wayne Tincaps

By: T.R. Slyder, TRSlyder@yahoo.com



Wow. My hometown's single-A baseball team just changed names for no reason. They used to be the Fort Wayne Wizards. Now they are the Johnny Appleseed homaging- Tincaps. Above is their logo. No seriously, that's their logo. Way to keep it greezy, Fort Weezy.


I just hope their motto is: "Hide the Women and Children: We're Coming to Your Town to Spread our Seed."




My long-winded rant on their new appellation: I don't get team names like that. When you name your team after an object (or person) that exists in your city, you do so when there is a plurality of them. Take the Florida Marlins, for instance. Florida has multitude of Marlins, so it makes sense to name them the MarlinS, plural. Their team represents all of the marlins in Florida. But if your city has one of something, you can't name it that name plural. It would be stupid for Chicago to have a team called The Sears Towers, because there is only one Sears Tower- you are pluralizing something singular and it doesn't work- if anything, you're diluting the cache of the one existing Sears Tower by claiming that you're fielding an entire team of little Sears Towers. Conversely, the Florida Marlins aren't cheapening the marlin population in the wild, because there are already so many of them.

Fort Wayne calling themselves the Tincaps is an homage to Johnny Appleseed who famously wore a tin put on his head during his Midwestern sojourn. No one else in Fort Wayne has ever worn tin, in any form, as a hat since him. So why pluralize something unique? But what's even dumber is that material of the Tincaps' caps is 85% acrylic, 15% wool! How the hell can you have such reverence for tin caps if you, yourself refuse to wear caps made of tin??? The White Sox wore actual white socks, and the Red Sox wore red socks back when socks were officially part of their uniforms. And the Red-winged Blackbird is an actual black bird with red wings!

So what makes Fort Wayne think it's so special that they think they don't have to abide by the precedents of name/uniform truth? Cuz I'm from there, baby.