Stick it, Chief Wahoo

I wonder what our president-elect things about politically-questionable team mascots, characters, and logos? Where do you think he comes down on the Cleveland Indians’ famous Chief Wahoo? The timing is a bit off; the time to bring this up was during the season.

But it reminded me and those of my fellow boomers might also recall the series of stickers manufactured by Fleer way back when. These were a pretty good purchase, cloth stickers you could put on your jackets or t-shirts or loose-leaf binders, etc.

These days, it would be hard to keep up. Teams can have more than one logo/image, to go along with the mind-numbing combination of uniforms and apparel. Here we go again: when I was a kid, you had 20 teams, 10 in each league. Each team had two uniforms: home and away (although Charley Finley’s Kansas City As did play around a little bit). Maybe in the colder weather they warm jackets. Now there are mix-and-match combinations of tops and bottoms, sometimes picked by the starting pitcher of a given game. There are also a team’s throwback uniforms worn on special occasions as well as replicas of those worn by players in the Negro Leagues. The cynic in me believes this is a money grab, given the fans more “must-have” paraphernalia. Not to mention those balaclavas and storm coats the teams are practically forced to wear early and late in the season.

There’s a great coffee table book that offers the evolution of each uniform and, by extension, accompanying logos, Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide by Marc Okkonen. By dint of its title, it needs an update. But with so many combos, it would by necessity be much larger than the original 274 pages in the hardcover edition.

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