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Date: July 27, 2021 07:21PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Indians"With Lajoie gone, the club needed a new name. Somers asked the local baseball writers to come up with a new name, and based on their input, the team was renamed the Cleveland Indians.[31] The name referenced the nickname "Indians" that was applied to the Cleveland Spiders baseball club during the time when Louis Sockalexis, a Native American, played in Cleveland (1897–99)"
But see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Spiders"For years the Cleveland Indians have claimed Spiders outfielder Louis Sockalexis as the inspiration for the team's name, which dates to 1915. Sockalexis played three seasons for the Cleveland Spiders, from 1897 to 1899, and is often credited as the first Native American to play professional baseball at the major league level. During his time with the Spiders, the press often referred to the team as the Indians or "Tebeau's Indians".[6] The Cleveland Indians claim has been disputed, however, including in a 2012 Cleveland Scene essay titled "The Curse of Chief Wahoo", which argues the Indians organization has cited Sockalexis in part to justify continued use of the controversial team name."
The essay referenced above
https://web.archive.org/web/20140117015226/http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/the-curse-of-chief-wahoo/Content?oid=2954423&showFullText=true""Why exactly would people in Cleveland — this in a time when Native Americans were generally viewed as subhuman in America — name their team after a relatively minor and certainly troubled outfielder?" asks Joe Posnanski, an award-winning sportswriter originally from Cleveland, now with USA Today.
Indeed, the man for whom the team is purportedly named played in only 96 games over three seasons, compiling just 367 at bats in his career — about half a season's worth for a typical ballplayer. But spotty performance wasn't the half of it.
"In all versions of the story, Sockalexis had to deal with horrendous racism, terrible taunts, whoops from the crowd, and so on," Posnanski wrote on his blog. Among those who cling to the feel-good story, "nobody ever mentions that Sockalexis may have ruined his career by jumping from the second-story window of a whorehouse. Or that he was an alcoholic."
In fact, according to NYU history professor Jonathan Zimmerman, "when alcoholism ended [Sockalexis'] brief major-league career, sportswriters reported that he had succumbed to an inherent 'Indian weakness.'"
Like Posnanski, Zimmerman calls the franchise's Sockalexis story "simply not true." He presents evidence that the franchise was renamed the Indians by sportswriters — not to honor Sockalexis, but to recall the sensational "fun" that he would inspire in crowds some 15 years earlier, when newspapermen would jokingly refer to the club as the "Cleveland Indians," even though it was formally named the Spiders.
Of course, it didn't hurt that the new name also happened to reinforce the image of Natives as anachronistic savages, the ballclub a fearsome force to be reckoned with. "In place of the Naps, we'll have the Indians, on the warpath all the time, and eager for scalps to dangle at their belts," wrote the Cleveland Leader in announcing the name change on January 17, 1915. In fact, none of the reports from the four daily Cleveland newspapers even mentions Sockalexis, but each is replete with negative stereotypes."
"When sociologist Ellen Staurowsky combed through the organization's promotional material from the time before the name change, she found no mention of Sockalexis until 1968, which was after Native Americans who had come to Cleveland under the federal relocation program began to protest the name and logo. "There is a vast difference between speculating the Indians were named after Sockalexis and making the claim the franchise now makes, that there was an intentional decision to honor him," Staurowsky told the Associated Press in 1999."