Baby Cakes? Official Site May Have Leaked Zephyrs New Name

It’s not set to be announced until later this evening but the official website of Minor League Baseball may have jumped the gun a little bit early.

Or it’s just a clever attempt to send us in the wrong direction.

Regardless, for a few hours early this morning the Pacific Coast League’s New Orleans Zephyrs (Miami Marlins AAA) were labelled “NEW ORLEANS BABY CAKES” throughout MiLB.com and on the official Zephyrs home page.

A screenshot courtesy @tylerbouldin, with a tip from @ChrisHaganTV caught this while it was still live on the site:

Team name changed to "Baby Cakes" both above the top banner and for the section header — Team name changed to “Baby Cakes” both above the top banner and for the section header

While the change has since been corrected, search engine caching hasn’t been quite as quick to catch up, performing a search on either MiLB.com or Google for “New Orleans Baby Cakes” still reveals the name in page titles throughout:

The Zephyrs are expected to announce their new team name and logo tonight at 6:30pm ET (5:30pm local), the finalists announced were:

Baby Cakes

Cajun Crawfish

King Cakes

Night Owls

Po’Boys

Red Eyes

Tailgators

Since then they’ve been narrowed down to Baby Cakes, Night Owls, and Tailgators.

None of the other names returns similar results on MiLB or Google searches. New Orleans inherited the Zephyrs name over 20 years ago when the franchise relocated from Denver in 1993, overall the team has been using that name since 1985.

In case you’re wondering what exactly a “Baby Cake” is, the New Orleans Times-Picayune explained it thusly earlier this year:

Can’t New Orleans brand anything without giving us all nightmares?

There are reasons to be skeptical about this leak, the Zephyrs have been dropping fake teasers with the different names all week – clearly having some fun with all of us name guessers. Is this just another part of the game? Either way it’s at least forced us to question what previously would have been a “slam dunk, this is definitely the name!” moment.

It has me looking at potential social media accounts and seeing that “Tailgators” is the only name of theirs on Facebook that’s been taken and isn’t currently open to the public, which raises an eyebrow… Tailgators is also the only Twitter account that’s been registered and, like Facebook, isn’t public. However, the account has been “suspended” and I don’t believe Twitter suspends accounts to allow for reservations but who knows.

Guess we’ll all have to wait and see what happens tonight, the unveiling is scheduled for 6:30pm ET.

UPDATE: So the team is certainly having fun with this one (and hey, it’s kinda fun for us too) as they’ve since changed their name to the “NIGHT OWLS” on the official site.

Two possibilities — one: this one and the Baby Cakes one were all part of the fake out they’d been doing all week, or two: someone actually buggered up early this morning and now they’re trying to throw everyone off by making it seem like it’s part of this clever game. Well. It’s working. Kudos.

UPDATE AGAIN: As expected, Tailgators is now showing as the team name on the official New Orleans site completing the trifecta.

Just a few hours until the official announcement.