Culture
From Dairy Daddies to Trash Pandas: How branding creates fans for lower-league baseball teams
Maybe you’ve seen him.
Perhaps his sideways glance and piercing blue eyes have crossed your timeline. His smirk might be all over your TikTok. If you follow baseball or if your algorithm has decided you like livestock, you may have encountered McCreamy, the muscular mascot of the Danville Dairy Daddies.
The brawny bull with a bright pink nose dons blue jeans and a “DD” belt buckle but no shirt, propping one hoof on his hip while the other rests against a bat standing by his feet. His unveiling went viral, providing a level of exposure not usually seen for a collegiate summer baseball team from an unincorporated Virginia city of 42,000 people in the regional Old North State League.
But this was no accident. The Danville Dairy Daddies knew exactly what they were doing.
There’s a story behind their name, a thought process behind their color palette and an award-winning designer behind their logo. Such is the case for many of the eccentric team names filling the minor leagues and collegiate summer leagues in recent years. The magic lies in the quirks that tie the clubs to their communities. The fun comes from the winks, nods and Easter eggs that teams incorporate in their branding to tell locals, “Hey, we know what makes this town special, and we’re leaning into it.”
That’s partially how a topless bull came to represent a team in Pittsylvania County, which boasts three of the five largest dairy farms in Virginia. The Dairy Daddies moniker 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 brain, and when he learned of the local connection, there was no denying the divining of the Dairy Daddies and their main man McCreamy.
“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.”
Good mooooorning fam. pic.twitter.com/a11eFunPhT
— Dairy Daddies (@DairyDaddies) February 29, 2024
Each component of McCreamy conveys a characteristic of his community. Paul Caputo, host of the “Baseball by Design” podcast, which explores the origin stories for minor-league nicknames, sees that same quality in team names across the country.
“You can tell the story of America by understanding why minor-league baseball teams have the names that they have,” he said.
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. Pinpointing the origins of the trend is difficult — you could trace it all the way back to the late 1800s, when a team called the Dudes existed in Pensacola, Fla. — but 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 (N.C.) Royals and Pulaski (Va.) Yankees re-emerged 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’s a nickname or logo that will make you stop and gawk. The Carolina Disco Turkeys. The Montgomery (Ala.) Biscuits (formerly the Orlando Rays). The Minot (N.D.) Hot Tots. The Rocket City (Ala.) Trash Pandas (formerly the Mobile BayBears). The Wichita Chili Buns (an alternate identity of the Wichita Wind Surge).
Without the constant media coverage and cash flow MLB organizations enjoy, lower-league teams have to get creative to stir up engagement, increase exposure and keep their franchises afloat.
“I see pictures of people visiting the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal and they’re wearing Trash Pandas shirts when they do it,” Rocket City’s director of marketing Ricky Fernandez said. “It blows my mind that someone’s like, ‘We’re going to the Eiffel Tower today! I better get my finest raccoon astronaut T-shirt on so I can snap a selfie!’”
Eiffel Tower 📍
Paris, France 🇫🇷https://t.co/5tFZEz6w5X pic.twitter.com/A88VZCgBdQ— Rocket City Trash Pandas (@trashpandas) June 23, 2022
Even with a local connection, an unusual name can take time to accept. Take the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. The Miami Marlins’ Triple-A 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 wasn’t immediately sold. Noel Blaha, Jacksonville’s vice president of 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 gonna go after the kids,” he said.
Still, someone started an online petition to change the name back to the Suns. Five thousand people signed within two hours.
“We got angry Facebook posts. We got some very offensive emails,” Blaha said. “People were pissed, point blank.”
But 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 (Wash.) Fish Sticks (previously the Highline Bears) experienced the same rejection-turned-resurgence after their new identity won an online poll pitting Fish Sticks against Seal Slingers as the two options for the team name.
“I had zero people get angry about the name the Highline Bears. I also had zero people get excited about it,” team president Justin Moser said. “Before we rebranded, I don’t think we ever sold anything online. Maybe one or two t-shirts as the Highline Bears.”
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 sellouts last summer and announced that their June 1 season opener sold out on April 23.
Fin Crispy Jr. is the mascot for the DubSea Fish Sticks, a summer collegiate baseball team in Washington. (Photo: Blake Dahlin / courtesy of the DubSea Fish Sticks)
These days, teams that aren’t getting creative with branding can seem a bit stale, said Caputo.
“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 staffers work with designers to brainstorm an identity linked to the local history, industries, cuisine, natural landmarks 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,” Brandiose co-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 GM Tony Ensor knew that nailing his Texas League team’s logo would be 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.”
The Amarillo Sod Poodles are the Double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. (Photo: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)
Scher, the Dairy Daddies GM, had similarly specific requests for Studio Simon 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.”
Partially inspired by McDreamy, the surgeon Patrick Dempsey portrays in “Grey’s Anatomy,” McCreamy also embodies the spirit of another beloved TV character. Simon sees the bull as boasting the charisma of Joey Tribbiani from “Friends” with a facial expression that seems to ask, “How you doin’?”
These flirty, wacky, happy characters do get some blowback for deviating from traditional logos, or for being kitschy tactics intended to sell T-shirts. 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!’ It’s not like you drew them in under false pretenses. It’s not that at all. Minor-league and collegiate summer league baseball, it’s fun! It’s fun to go to those games, so you bring in new fans and you’ve made new fans who hopefully come back.”
The players, whether they’re 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,” Fernandez of the Trash Pandas said. “The old team we had before they moved, we were getting like 200, 300 people a game. It was kinda 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 starting shortstop Zach Neto, who played 37 games for Rocket City (based in Madison, Ala.) on his path to the majors, had a pair of custom Trash Panda cleats made and said he still rocks the team’s merch.
“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.”
The college kids feel it, too. East Carolina catcher Ryan McCrystal, who spent the last two summers as a Burlington Sock Puppet, said the North Carolina community embraced all the players but admitted it can take a bit of effort to convince friends and family you’re 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. It’s easier to build up a community around a team name that is something that brings people together,” he said.
“It’s the only sport that you can really do it where it makes sense. It’s something small but beautiful about the game.”
(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic; top photos courtesy of Rocket City Trash Pandas, Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
Newly released body cam footage shows response to massive industrial explosion in Gloucester County
Grass fire burning thousands of acres in Quay County
2 Candidates Emerge in NC State’s Coaching Search
Former North Dakota deputy remains free on bail despite new charge
Remains of Ohio airmen killed in Iraq will be brought back March 29
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
WATCH: Senate hearing goes silent after Angel Father confronts top Dem over daughter’s death
US diplomat Marco Rubio denounces settler violence, tolls in Hormuz strait
Iran-linked hackers have breached FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal emails | CNN Politics
Live: CPAC 2026 Day 2
Video: Will ICE Change Under Its New Leader?
-
Detroit, MI1 week agoDrummer Brian Pastoria, longtime Detroit music advocate, dies at 68
-
Movie Reviews1 week ago‘Youth’ Twitter review: Ken Karunaas impresses audiences; Suraj Venjaramoodu adds charm; music wins praise | – The Times of India
-
Sports6 days agoIOC addresses execution of 19-year-old Iranian wrestler Saleh Mohammadi
-
New Mexico5 days agoClovis shooting leaves one dead, four injured
-
Business1 week agoDisney’s new CEO says his focus is on storytelling and creativity
-
Technology5 days agoYouTube job scam text: How to spot it fast
-
Tennessee4 days agoTennessee Police Investigating Alleged Assault Involving ‘Reacher’ Star Alan Ritchson
-
Texas1 week agoHow to buy Houston vs. Texas A&M 2026 March Madness tickets