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Editorial: What's in a Name?
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Business New Haven
2/16/2004
By: BNH
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As pitchers and catchers report this week to spring training sites in Florida and Arizona, hope blooms anew that the return of robins and crocuses will before long push this cruelest of winters off the stage.
And although ancient Yale Field remains ice-bound still, soon enough horsehide, leader and ash - oops, we mean aluminum - will collide in a chorus of spring's happiest song. Yes, on March 20 at noon the ballpark that has seen Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and George H.W. Bush will return to life as the Yale baseball team opens its home season with a doubleheader against New York Tech.
For the first time in 11 years, Yale won't be sharing its ballpark with the New Haven Ravens, whose new ownership took their balls and bats and went home to a new ballpark in the Granite State. But there will be professional baseball, of a sort, at Yale Field in 2004, albeit not until Memorial Day. We think and we hope that that it a good thing.
Of all the names the owners of the new baseball team to be resident at Yale Field this summer could have chosen, the "New Haven County Cutters" ranks quite high on the weasel scale.
It's not the "cutter" part that we object to. (It's freighted in this instance with twin meanings: a Coast Guard patrol vessel, and a "cut" fastball, a newfangled breaking pitch.)
But naming a team after a county? C'mon. Especially in Connecticut - a state in which counties exist as geographic entities only.
Team President Rick Handelman, who moved his independent Northeast League team to New Haven from Pittsfield, Mass., probably doesn't know that. What he may have learned so far from talking to the locals is something about the history of bad karma for professional baseball teams playing on the otherwise charming greensward at Yale Field. (Which, technically, lies in West Haven - but that's another story.)
"We felt the county-wide name fit what we are trying to do," Handelman explained. "We want everyone from Milford to Madison and north to Waterbury and Meriden to feel a part of this team."
Yes, wouldn't we all.
Handelman faces a hard sell here. A Major League-affiliated team just two brief steps removed from the majors couldn't fill Yale Field - even after winning the Eastern League championship two years ago. And Handelman's partner, Jonathan Fleisig, found himself at the center of considerable controversy in the Berkshires (for reference see Jim Bouton's Foul Ball, published just last year, a gripping account of corporate and political double-dealing in a onetime GE company town).
A good team name might help build support for the newcomers - but the "County Cutters" ain't it. Pro teams are supposed to be named after cities. Nobody puts his name on a waiting list for tickets to see the Bergen County Giants, and Joe Gibbs didn't agree to return to coach the Potomac Basin Indigenous Persons. Bernie Williams does not patrol center field for the Tri-State Union Soldiers, nor Pedro Martinez hurl for the Massachusetts Bay Crimson Hose.
And while we're on the subject: Following its relocation to Manchester, N.H., the team formerly known as the New Haven Ravens (itself a pretty crapola handle, now that we think of it) now answers to the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. Being renamed for a member of the weasel family is a fate we find singularly appropriate for the club we knew and once loved.
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