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Now that the Winter Meetings are over, baseball news should be slowing down for a while, giving fans the opportunity to have some fun thinking about things like the inverse names of baseball teams. Yesterday, a Reddit user named AmericanCataphract posted “Franchise power rankings by inverted team name” to r/baseball with a list of team names that are the “opposite” of the real name. It ranged from the obvious (Cincinnati Greens) to the grim (Tampa Bay Irwins) to the obscure (Toronto Red Ws).
Because this is the Internet, later that same day, another Reddit user, ThisMeansWarm, had already created logos for these mirror universe teams:
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I particularly liked the Atlanta Cowards logo and I would be thrilled to purchase team gear with that logo. But I couldn’t say the same for the inverse name of our Blue Jays. I could not figure out why “W” was opposite to “J” (or “Jays”) until TurfPod co-host Joshua Howsam pointed out that W is the farthest letter away from J in the English alphabet. Twitter user and Blue Jays play-by-play call compiler @james_in_to then contributed this graphic which shows more clearly the antipodal nature of the two letters:
— James G (@james_in_to) December 13, 2019
I dug into American literature to find a couple of possible opposite names for the Blue Jays: they could be the Atticuses or the Mockingbirds. In one of the most memorable quotes from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch—who was not a fan of guns—gave his son Jem some rules around gun play:
“I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
What names would you suggest to call the alternate Blue Jays? What other names from the list would you change?