From Dairy Daddies to Trash Pandas: How Branding Creates Fans for Major League Baseball Teams

Maybe you’ve seen him.

Maybe his sideways glance and piercing blue eyes crossed your timeline. His grin can be seen all over your TikTok. If you follow baseball or your algorithm has decided you like cattle, you may have come across McCreamy, the muscular mascot of the Danville Dairy Daddies.

The muscular bull with a bright pink nose is wearing jeans and a DD buckle, but no shirt. One hoof rests on his hip while the other rests against a bat at his feet. His revelation went viral and brought a level of fame not normally seen for a collegiate summer baseball team from an unincorporated Virginia city of 42,000 in the regional Old North State League.

But this was no coincidence. 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. That’s the case for many of the eccentric team names that filled the minor leagues and collegiate summer leagues in recent years. The magic lies in the quirks that connect the clubs to their communities. The fun comes from the winks, nods, and Easter eggs that teams work into their branding to tell locals, “Hey, we know what makes this city special, and we’re leaning into it.”

That’s partly how a topless bull came to represent a team in Pittsylvania County, which boasts three of the five largest dairy farms in Virginia. The name Dairy Daddies 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 mind, and when he learned of the local connection, there was no denying the fortune telling of the Dairy Daddies and their main man McCreamy.

“While it’s quirky and silly and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there’s a very real community connection,” Scher said. “The blue and pink are designed to evoke feelings of newness, birth and rebirth. When you see those two colors together, you might think of a gender reveal party or a nursery. Then you look at this muscular cow and you think, ‘Well, that’s not a baby. That’s very mature.’ Danville and all of Southern Virginia are in the midst of this massive resurgence.”

Good morning family. pic.twitter.com/a11eFunPhT

— Dairy Fathers (@DairyDaddies) February 29, 2024

Each part of McCreamy conveys a characteristic of its community. Paul Caputo, host of the “Baseball by Design” podcast, which explores the origin stories of minor league nicknames, sees that same quality in team names across the country.

“You can tell America’s story by understanding why minor league baseball teams have the names they do,” he said.

The Dairy Daddies are just the latest in a long line of minor league baseball teams to abandon traditional names in favor of more flashy identities. It’s hard to pinpoint the origins of this trend—you could trace it all the way back to the late 1800s, when there was a team called The Dudes in Pensacola, Florida—but the recent wave of silliness stems in part from the downsizing of Major League Baseball clubs. affiliated minor leagues from 163 teams to 120. Forty-three franchises lost their affiliation in 2020. Many of those teams played under the same name as their former MLB parent clubs and had to be renamed. Former rookie league teams such as the Burlington (NC) 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 retained their MLB affiliations have also jumped on the funky name train in hopes of boosting their brands. Pick almost any league, at any level, and there’s a nickname or logo you can’t stop staring at. The Carolina Disco Turkeys. The Montgomery (Ala.) Biscuits (formerly the Orlando Rays). The Minot (ND) 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 attention and cash flow that MLB organizations enjoy, lower-league teams have to get creative to increase engagement, increase awareness and keep their franchises going.

“I see pictures of people visiting the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal and they wear Trash Pandas shirts when they do,” said Rocket City marketing director Ricky Fernandez. “I find it baffling when someone says, ‘We’re going to the Eiffel Tower today! I better put on my nicest raccoon astronaut T-shirt so I can take 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, it may take some time for an unusual name to be accepted. Take the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. The Miami Marlins’ Triple-A affiliate played as the Suns from 1990 to 2016, when new ownership took over. Although the new team name is related to the local shrimp industry, the public was not immediately sold. Noel Blaha, Jacksonville’s vice president of marketing and media, said the antipathy was expected and they planned the unveiling accordingly.

“We very purposefully put some elementary school kids in the front row of the press conference because if things went in the wrong direction and people were throwing tomatoes, they wouldn’t go after the kids,” he said.

Yet someone started an online petition to change the name back to The Suns. Five thousand people signed within two hours.

“We received angry Facebook posts. We have received some very offensive emails,” Blaha said. “People were angry, downright.”

But slowly the tide turned.

“It resulted in 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 (formerly the Highline Bears) experienced the same rejection and revival after their new identity won an online poll that pitted Fish Sticks against Seal Slingers as the two options for the team name.

“No people were upset about the name Highline Bears. There weren’t any people who were excited about it either,” said team president Justin Moser. “Before we rebranded, I don’t think we ever sold anything online. Maybe a t-shirt or two like the Highline Bears.

Despite backlash on social media calling the new name stupid and “an embarrassment to the area,” the Fish Sticks have since shipped orders to all fifty states and nine countries. They recorded five sold-out editions last summer and announced that their season opener on June 1 was sold out on April 23.

Today, teams that don’t get creative with branding can seem a bit old-fashioned, Caputo says.

“Being named after a local animal just feels very 1990s,” he added. “It feels old.”

That’s where sports branding companies come into the picture. In the minor league baseball world, there are two bigwigs responsible for most of the new, splashy nicknames: Brandiose and Studio Simon. Team employees work with designers to brainstorm an identity related to local history, industries, cuisine, natural monuments or traditions.

“Every community has a story waiting to be told, and the goal is that when you visit a sports experience, especially in minor league baseball, we want you to step into a whole different world,” said Jason Klein, co-founder of Brandiose . “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.”

Each team’s story is anchored by its logo, the main character of the story. Tony Ensor, general manager of Amarillo Sod Poodles, knew that capturing 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 GM of Dairy Daddies, had similar specific requests for Dan Simon, creative director of Studio Simon, when forming McCreamy. Simon imagined that the bull had a father’s body. The answer was a quick ‘no’.

“They wanted it built, but not by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s perfectly tuned,” Simon said. ‘This cow would become something of a ladies’ man. Or, in this case, a male cow is a bull. So he is a cow man.”

Inspired in part by McDreamy, the surgeon Patrick Dempsey portrays on “Grey’s Anatomy,” McCreamy also embodies the spirit of another beloved TV character. Simon sees that the bull has the charisma of Joey Tribbiani from “Friends,” with a facial expression that seems to ask, “How are you?”

These flirty, goofy, fun-loving characters do get some backlash for deviating from traditional logos, or for being kitschy tactics designed to sell T-shirts. But Simon, Klein and the teams that proudly play as Sock Puppets, Trash Pandas and Sod Poodles are dismissing that idea.

“The sports fans go to the games anyway,” Simon said. “These identities attract people who otherwise wouldn’t come, and hopefully when they come, they say, ‘Hey, this was fun!’ I’ll come again!’ It’s not like you brought them in under false pretenses. It’s not that at all. Minor league baseball and collegiate summer league, it’s fun! It’s fun to go to those games, so you bring in new fans and you’ve created new fans that will hopefully come back.”

The players, whether college athletes trying to get on scouts’ radar or minor leaguers assigned to the clubs by their MLB organizations, also benefit from the increased exposure and engaged audience.

“I’ve heard from several players that it’s a taste of the majors before you actually go to the show,” said Fernandez of the Trash Pandas. “With the old team we had before they moved, we were getting about 200 to 300 people per game. It was quite sad to be at a match because there were so many empty seats. Here we have taken the lead in the league every season. We have an average of 5,000 people per evening.”

Los Angeles Angels starting shortstop Zach Neto, who played 37 games for Rocket City (based in Madison, Ala.) on his way to the majors, had a pair of custom Trash Panda cleats made and said he still buys the merchandise from the team rocks.

“We got to play there every night in a great atmosphere,” he said. “Even to this day, I still see myself as a Trash Panda.”

The students feel it too. East Carolina catcher Ryan McCrystal, who spent the past two summers as a Burlington Sock Puppet, said the North Carolina community embraced all the players, but admitted it may take some effort to convince friends and family to sign up for a real team plays.

“They think it’s a joke, but I think it’s really cool because it’s easier to rally around a team with a name like that. It’s easier to build a community around a team name that brings people together,” he said.

“It’s the only sport you can really practice if it makes sense. It’s something small but beautiful about the game.”

(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletics; top photos courtesy of Rocket City Trash Pandas, Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp)