Baseball teams carry their names like old luggage. Some of those names make perfect sense in one city and none at all in another. When the franchise boards a plane and lands somewhere new, the front office has to answer a surprisingly hard question: Who are we now? The answer appears on caps, jerseys, and stadium facades, and it often tells you more about the new city than about the team itself. Every relocated MLB franchise has gone through this process, and the results range from graceful civic tributes to bureaucratic headaches that end up in trademark court. What stays, what goes, and what gets invented from scratch are decisions that sit at the intersection of graphic design, local identity, and cold commercial logic.
Old Names in New Homes
The history of MLB relocation is filled with name changes that tried to root a franchise in its new geography. When the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore in 1954, they dropped the Browns name entirely. The new identity, the Orioles, honored Maryland's state bird. It also connected the franchise to previous Baltimore baseball clubs that had used the same name decades earlier. The bird logo gave the team an instant regional identity that felt native to the area rather than imported from Missouri.
A similar thing happened when the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee after a single season in 1969. The Pilots' name had obvious ties to Seattle's port culture and aerospace sector. Milwaukee had no particular connection to that word. So the team became the Brewers, a nod to the city's deep ties to the beer industry. The name carried local weight, and the logo work that followed over the years leaned into that association with barrel imagery and wheat-ball glove designs.
Both of these cases followed the same principle. A team's name should mean something to the people buying the tickets.
Relocated Franchises and the Money That Follows Them
When a team moves, so does the commercial infrastructure around it. Merchandise sales reset overnight because fans in the new city want gear with updated logos and names. Media deals get renegotiated, and local sponsorship packages are built from scratch. The Athletics' move to Las Vegas puts all of this into motion at once, especially with a $2 billion stadium under construction on the Strip.
Revenue from team partnerships has expanded well beyond traditional billboard and jersey patch deals. Sportsbook operators now pay for naming rights, in-stadium lounges, and co-branded content that runs across a team's broadcast and social channels. Sports betting partnerships, in particular, have become a reliable revenue stream for franchises in states with legal wagering, and Nevada's long history with licensed sportsbooks makes Las Vegas one of the most natural markets for that kind of deal. A relocated team entering that city arrives with a built-in pool of potential partners who already operate at scale. The branding has to be locked in before those agreements can close, though, because sponsors need finalized logos, approved trademarks, and retail-ready assets before they commit dollars.
The financial reset also forces the franchise to quickly define its identity. The USPTO denied trademark applications for "Las Vegas Athletics" and "Vegas Athletics" in late December 2025, complicating licensing timelines for retail and broadcast partners alike.
The Athletics and the Trademark Problem
The A's current move from Oakland to Las Vegas is the most visible relocation case in recent memory, and it has produced some unusual branding complications. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denied the team's attempts to register "Las Vegas Athletics" and "Vegas Athletics" in late December 2025. The ruling stated that the word "Athletics" lacks distinctiveness when applied to the team's goods and services. The USPTO, however, approved "Las Vegas A's" for publication, meaning the abbreviated form passed where the full name did not.
This matters because trademark registration controls what a franchise can print, sell, and license. Without approved trademarks, retail production timelines stall, and broadcast partners have fewer branded assets to work with.
Meanwhile, the team's uniforms from 2025 to 2027 feature the "Athletics" wordmark without a city name. That is an unusual choice for a major league team. The jerseys do include a green sleeve patch showing Sacramento's Tower Bridge, a reference to the team's temporary home before the Las Vegas stadium opens. So the visual identity is split between a city the team hasn't arrived in yet and a city that was never supposed to be permanent.
Cleveland and the Full Identity Rebuild
Not every rebranding involves a move to a new city. Sometimes the city stays the same, and the name changes for other reasons. Cleveland dropped the "Indians" name after the 2021 season and became the Guardians. The new name comes from the "Guardians of Traffic" statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge, which sits near the team's ballpark.
The logo work reinforced that connection. The winged "G," formally called the Guardians Fastball Logo, borrows its design from the helmets on those statues. The placement of the wings references a split-finger fastball grip, tying the visual identity to the franchise's pitching history. The design team drew on both local architecture and baseball tradition in a single mark, giving the new identity a sense of continuity even though the name itself was brand-new.
This case is instructive because it shows how much thought goes into translating a civic reference into something that works on a hat. A logo has to function at very small sizes, reproduce well in single colors, and still communicate something about where the team comes from.
What the Uniform Says When the Team Won't
Sports Logo History
Compare that to Baltimore in 1954 or Milwaukee in 1969, where the new name and logo arrived together as a package. Those franchises wanted the new city to feel ownership from the start. The A's approach is more cautious, likely because the trademark situation is unresolved and the stadium is still under construction. A 33,000-capacity venue on the Las Vegas Strip is being built, but until it opens, the team's visual identity remains in a holding pattern.
Logos as Civic Contracts
A team logo, when done well, tells the local population that the franchise belongs to them. The Orioles bird says Maryland. The Brewers' name says Milwaukee. The Guardians wing says Cleveland. Each of these marks was designed to earn local buy-in, and each succeeded because the references were specific and genuine.
The A's will eventually need to do the same thing for Las Vegas. The "Las Vegas A's" trademark approval gives them a starting point, but the full visual identity has not been revealed. When it does arrive, it will need to do what every successful relocation rebrand has done before it: prove to the new city that this team is theirs now, not someone else's leftovers wearing different colors.
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