Quote:
Originally Posted by Pelican
Not your question, but in my contemporary sims I move the Pirates to New Orleans, and rechristen them the "Buccaneers". So that they are still pirates but also get a new name in a new city that definitely had real pirates hanging out back in the day.
But we all have our bias and predilections. I can't stand "Expos" or "Astros" as team names. A defunct, money-losing fair and a dated reference to space travel now taking place in Texas and Florida? The transplanted Rays are the Montreal Mounties. And, with a nod to history, Houston is the Colts - without the gun reference.
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TBH I like these names precisely because they're outdated. They become kind of part of the historical fabric of the city. It's not super far off from the former Seattle (and hopefully soon-to-be-future) NBA team, the Supersonics, who were named after a deal Boeing (a Seattle-based company, at least in the 60s) had to build an SST that never panned out.
New York no longer has a particularly large Dutch population and hell in that case I don't even think you could argue that in the 1940s when the Knicks (Knickerbockers) first started playing in the NBL/BAA. The Dodgers are named after a phenomenon that was part of Brooklyn, not LA ("trolley dodgers") and which I don't think is a thing in any US city anymore anyway (I guess San Francisco has a trolley line and, like, light rail is kiiiind of like trolleys, sort of, but that's a stretch and people have figured out since the 1890s that it's not a great idea to walk in the middle of the street anymore). The A's are no longer an arm of the Philadelphia Athletic Club; indeed, that particular franchise never was.