It’s okay if you heard the name of minor league baseball’s Akron RubberDucks, double-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians, and you thought, “Okay, now they’re just flipping open the dictionary and naming teams after the first word they point to.” But the RubberDucks’ name has a specific and meaningful origin story that you’d never have guessed without knowing some of the city’s history.
Let’s start with the first half of the name, rubber: “Akron was the rubber capital of the world for years,” said the team’s general manager, Jim Pfander. “My grandfather actually worked down the street from the ballpark, two blocks away, where BF Goodrich was, when Akron was the tire capital of the world, and the rubber capital of the world. Tying in the rubber industry makes a lot of sense.”
And while Akron’s rubber heyday climaxed in the 1950s, the industry is still a major factor in the city’s culture and economy. “Not only is the rubber industry part of our past, it’s also part of our future,” Pfander said. “Goodyear moved their headquarters back to Akron about a year and a half ago, and built a brand-new headquarters. Firestone has a service and tech center that they just built about two years ago.”
So okay, there’s a connection to rubber in Akron. What about the second part, ducks?
The team’s stadium—Canal Park—is built on the Ohio and Erie Canal. “What usually comes with canals are ducks,” Pfander said. “We have a number of ducks that float and swim and fly around the ballpark, especially behind the ballpark in the canals.”
And how do you tie a neat little bow around the rubber industry and real ducks and the history of Akron?
“When the rubber industry was rocking here years ago,” Pfander said, “one of the first rubber ducks made in the United States was made here in Akron as well. So there’s a lot of different tie-ins.”
Of course, the danger in naming your team after a bath toy is that maybe you’ve taken the trend of hyper-marketable, kid-friendly logos one step too far. “A lot of people think of rubber ducks, they think of the yellow squeaky bath toy in Bert and Ernie,” Pfander said. “But when you see this logo, it’s a 180. You’re like wow, that’s a tough-looking duck.”
The RubberDucks just completed their first season with the new nickname, but the franchise has been playing in Ohio since 1989, first in nearby Canton as the Canton-Akron Indians, then moving to Akron in 1997, where they adopted the cryptic nickname Aeros. (The team initially announced that it was going to be called the Akron Blast in honor of Judy Resnik, who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. That decision was widely considered to be in poor taste, especially given that the mascot’s name is Kaboom, and the team quickly changed plans.)
After setting Eastern League attendance records in their first three years in Akron, attendance declined over the course of the next decade, dropping from more than half a million in 1999 to just over 250,000 in 2012, as fans felt ownership was not maintaining the stadium. In 2011 and 2012, new management and ownership took over the team, invested in renovating the stadium, and looked at making a change in branding. What they learned in their market research was that there was not a strong attachment to the name Aeros, in part because no one knew what it meant.
“We’d meet with groups of 15 people at a time and we’d sit them in a room and say, ‘What does the name Aeros mean to you?’ Pfander said. “As you’d go around the room, you’d get 15 different answers. No one could identify what an Aero was. Some people said it was Ohio’s contribution to air flight with the Wright brothers, some people said it was aeronautics with the Goodyear Blimp. Akron’s contributions to astronauts was another one.”
And while fans took to the name RubberDucks quickly, they didn’t do so immediately. Pfander’s friend Scott Hunsicker, general manager of the Reading Fightin Phils, had just gone through his own rebranding effort, and warned that it would be tough going for a few months. “I tell you what,” Pfander said, “I was ready for three months of it and we only got three days.”
But those three days were eventful. “I got a call that was, ‘Is this an April Fool’s joke?’ People thought we were out of our minds,” Pfander said. “But once people saw the name together with the logo, immediately, the radio stations were saying, ‘Hey, look at it. This is a pretty good-looking logo.'”
That acceptance was reflected in merchandise sales. “We almost sold more merchandise by opening day than we did the previous year,” Pfander said. “We had merchandise sold in all 50 states within a week of us announcing the rebrand.”
The RubberDucks’ primary logo (at the top of this post), designed by the prolific firm Brandiose, features tire tracks and a duck gritting its teeth. (Pfander admits, “I’ve never looked inside a duck’s mouth, but I would think that a duck doesn’t have any teeth.”) The next most popular logo, a duck face with tire tread arms (above, left), is featured on the team’s batting practice caps. Next up is the letter A made from tire treads (above, right), featured on the team’s Sunday cap, and finally, the team’s road cap logo, a duck foot A (right).
The team colors started with black and gold, but there was a place-specific problem. “If you keep it black and gold those are Steelers colors, and here in northeast Ohio that’s a bad word,” Pfander said, “so we can’t be identified with the Steelers or even the Pirates for that matter. Black and orange, well that’s the Cincinnati Bengals, and you know again, we want to separate ourselves from Cincinnati.”
So the RubberDucks needed an accent color, which would be inspired by a family moment. “I have a pond real close to my house and I was taking my daughters down there for a walk,” Pfander said. “We actually got a chance to get up close to a duck and in the duck’s feathers, they have a blue feather.”
Conversations about what sort of blue the team should use landed on what Pfander calls electric blue, and a unique uniform design. “We’re the only team in baseball to have an electric blue jersey,” Pfander said. (That jersey is seen here on noted RubberDuck Jason Giambi.)
Of course, ducks and baseball are forever intertwined, so the team has renamed certain parts of the park (“You know, fowl territory, F-O-W-L”) and certain expressions are used frequently (“You have ducks on a pond when the bases are loaded,” Pfander said, “you’ve got a duck snort when a ball just gets over the shortstop’s head and lands in the outfield”).
And sometimes, ducks are incorporated into the entertainment in ways not specific to baseball, such as one promotion in 2014 when the team gave away woopie cushions. “‘Oops, I Stepped on a Duck Night’ was pretty entertaining,” Pfander said.
Perhaps more than any other, the RubberDucks are one of the poster teams for team nicknames geared for children. Not only does their logo have a cartoonish quality about it, but they’re actually named for a toy. But the connection of their name to the history of their home city adds a level of meaning to an otherwise whimsical name that many casual observers might not expect.
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