The Perfect Union: The Story Behind the Winston-Salem Dash

I’ve discovered a lot of unique team name origins in the course of writing this Story Behind the Nickname series, but just when I had given up my dream of finding a team that combined two of my passions, baseball and punctuation, I stumble across the Winston-Salem Dash.

The town of Salem in what would become North Carolina was settled and established by members of the Moravian Church in the mid-1700s. About a century later, the town of nearby Winston was established. The two existed separately for decades—including for more than 30 years after a failed referendum to unite the cities in 1879—until the US Post Office, always the forward-thinking fashion-maker, established a post office in 1899 that referred to the towns as the unified name of Winston-Salem. In 1913, another public referendum in the two cities established what the Post Office already knew, that Winston-Salem should be united as one.

The towns consolidate. Via North Carolina Miscellany.

Another entity that referred to the two cities as one was the minor league baseball Winston-Salem Twins, who first appeared on the scene in 1905—a full eight years before the official merger. The Twins name came from Winston-Salem’s nickname among locals, the Twin City. (It’s worth noting that another of Winston-Salem’s nicknames is the Camel City because of its importance to the tobacco industry. Seems like there’s a potential minor league nickname there.) When the current team was choosing a new name in 2009, there was one important reason not to reprise that original Twins moniker.

“A White Sox affiliate probably couldn’t be named the Twins,” said Brian Boesch, the team’s Associate Director of Media Relations and Broadcasting.

Between 1945 and 2008, baseball teams in Winston-Salem would go by the names Cardinals (1945–1953), Red Birds (1957–1960), Red Sox (1961–1983), Spirits (1984–1994), and Warthogs (1995–2008). When the team moved to its shiny new home at BB&T Ballpark, named for the financial services giant headquartered in town, they decided it was time for a new name.

“The Warthogs are still well regarded and well remembered in this town and they will be for a long time,” Boesch said. “It was the main motivation there, going downtown, going into a new ballpark. Let’s have a new, fresh, modern look…. We wanted it to kind of signal a whole new period of time in our organization.”

That new name for the team in the new ballpark would come from that tiny but symbolic bit of punctuation between Winston and Salem.

“The Dash represents the dash in Winston-Salem,” Boesch said. “Beyond that, it represents the connection within the community. Winston-Salem has always been a community that has had a kind of a unique connection, one that a hundred-plus years ago didn’t exist. So that’s where it comes from.”

Of course, the word dash has other connotations pertinent to baseball, and the logo plays off the most obvious one, that of running fast. “We’ll sometimes do some marketing toward some different definitions of dash,” Boesch said. “This year, our slogan was ‘Time to Dash.'”

If you can’t quite shake the image of your grade school English teacher sadly shaking her head in admonition, it’s because there’s a word for that punctuation mark between Winston and Salem, and it’s not dash.

“I know, technically, the word for it is hyphen,” Boesch said. “We’ve gotten that before.”

Grammar nerds will tell you that dashes are not the conjoiners of words that hyphens are, but rather serve to separate thoughts within a sentence (among other uses). Those grammar nerds will then be happy to go on and on about the differences between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes and their various lengths and purposes. But guess what? Those grammar nerds will be sitting at home crying in their Chicago Manual of Style while everyone else is out living their lives.

Yeah, it’s technically not a dash between Winston and Salem, but the Winston-Salem Hyphens would be a terrible name for a baseball team. “The dash represents not just the punctuation in the city name, but also the unique, special connection within this whole city, this whole community,” Boesch said.

The Dash’s primary logo, designed by Terry Smith, features a forward-moving baseball character, and has a certain sideways shape to it. “When you see the horizontal logo, it kind of looks like a dash,” Boesch said. “It lends to that secondary meaning of, it’s not a racing thing, but dash, you’re going quickly.”

The team’s alternate logos feature a dashing, unnamed baseball character and the team’s initials set in purple. The color choice is not unique to the city, but was chosen for being a little bit different. “There’s no sort of Winston-Salem connection to purple,” Boesch said. It was just sort of something clean and modern…. Purple definitely jumps off the page, that’s for sure.”

What the Winston-Salem Dash lack in grammatical correctness, they make up for in having a nickname that’s kind of adorable. The dash (hyphen) is the symbol of a union of two cities that goes back 102 years, and it’s endearing that the local baseball team chose to celebrate this enduring relationship with the only nickname I know of based on punctuation.