Becoming the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves

It’s fair today to ask whether the Atlanta Braves honor something worth honoring.

Unlike the Sockalexis case, there is little question about the origin of the Braves nickname for the team that now plays in Atlanta.

More than a century ago, while the team was a fixture in Boston, it became an informal custom to name the team after its owner.

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That is why when two brothers named George and John Dovey purchased the team prior to the 1907 season, they became identified as the Boston Doves. John Dovey sold the team following the 1910 season to William Russell, at which time the Doves became the Rustlers.

That lasted just one season until Russell in turn sold the team to a New York-based political functionary named James Gaffney.

As amusing as it might be to consider a major league team known as the Gaffes, Gaffney had a more readily identifiable trait. He was a recognized insider at Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party machine that ran New York City. The Tammany Hall mascot in those days was the Brave; Tammany politicians and functionaries were known as Braves. So when Gaffney assumed ownership of the Boston National League team, they immediately became known as the Braves in deference to Gaffney’s well-publicized political connections. Gaffney even adopted Tammany’s Braves logo as the team’s own.

Gaffney sold his interest in the team less than a decade later, but apparently retained a silent financial interest. In any event, by that time the Braves had won the 1914 World Series and the name had become a fixture.

The Atlanta Braves leave and return

That fixture remained until the mid-1930s when the team was purchased by a group led by Robert Quinn. One of his first actions was to change the team name, not because he considered it offensive to Natives but in order to disassociate the club from its Tammany roots.

Quinn chose to re-flag the Braves as the Boston Bees, and it was as the Bees that the club paid for five seasons.

Perhaps due to the team’s poor play — the Bees never finished in the National League’s first division — the name change never really caught on. So prior to the 1940 season, the Braves’ name was reinstated. In the interim, and particularly since the 1960s, there have been various efforts to rebrand the team on the argument that the term Braves is racially insensitive and/or biased.

But through team relocations to Milwaukee and then Atlanta, the nickname has remained. Today there is a general presumption that the name was ginned up to conjure images of Native fighting warrior spirit.

The reality, though, is different. Historically the Braves do not memorialize frontier conflict so much as they honor big-city political graft and corruption.

To the extent one believes the Braves nickname should be retired, that is by far the more accurate historical rationale for doing so.