Cleveland’s baseball team changes name to the Guardians

The Guardians

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Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team will change its name to Guardians, the franchise announced Friday, dropping the racially offensive name it has been known as for more than a century.

The name Guardians is a reference to well-known Art Deco statues located on the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, which spans the Cuyahoga River and connects downtown Cleveland to the city’s trendy Ohio City neighborhood. Those statues are known as the “Guardians of Traffic.”

The franchise, which announced the name change in a tweet Friday morning, had long faced pressure from activists locally and nationally to ditch the name “Indians,” which critics said was racist. It had been the baseball club’s name since 1915.

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In December, the Cleveland baseball team said it would change its name after the 2021 season, a move seen by some as long overdue. Protests by Native American activists outside of the team’s stadium had for years been commonplace, particularly on Opening Day.

The franchise moved away from its longtime “Chief Wahoo” logo after the 2018 season, with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred saying at the time it was “no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball.”

In a post Friday, the team explained the name Guardians: “To protect, to keep watch, to defend. For Clevelanders, this is a way of life. We fight together for what we believe in. And if we get knocked down, we pick each other right back up and keep fighting. We’re resilient, hard working and loyal – to this city and to each other. That’s what it means to be Cleveland Guardians.”

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And yet the very name is founded in your inability to protect, keep watch, and defend your own mascot. Pardon me if the name “Guardians” does not cause me to swoon with fear and intimidation.

What an empty bunch of nothing.


As far as the Native Americans are concerned, they’re fast going the way of the dinosaurs, becoming extinct and all but forgotten about because they are quite literally wiping their own selves from our memories. The only place we’ll find them represented is in history books, and once kids graduate, they’ll never give them a second thought.

Well done.