The Total Takeovers That Transform Minor League Teams for a Night

For back-to-back home games in early April, the Cleveland Monsters will turn into the Cleveland Pierogies Hockey Club. 

When the team, which is the American Hockey League (AHL) affiliate of the Columbus Blue Jackets, hits the ice at Rocket Arena, players will don jerseys featuring a skate-wearing, stick-wielding, anthropomorphized pierogi. Digital arena signage will be updated with a new team logo, a half-eaten pierogi in the shape of a C. Instead of the Monsters’ usual black and blue, the primary colors of the Pierogies will be the red and white of the Polish flag.

“We went as far as creating a mascot,” Monsters CMO Ben Adams tells Front Office Sports. “We’re working on finding a good pierogi suit.”

For minor league outfits across several sports, the calendar is reliably crammed with run-of-the-mill theme nights celebrating local heritages, raising awareness for social causes, offering sponsored giveaways—whatever puts more butts in seats and helps bring in precious revenue. The Monsters, for instance, held a promotional “Pucks and Pierogies Night” in 2024 in tribute of the city’s historic Polish population, offering special ticket packages that came with a limited edition T-shirt declaring “PUCKS & PIEROGIES: That’s what Cleveland does!” and selling freshly fried batches of the doughy Polish dumpling at concession stands during the game.

But teams are increasingly going bigger with “alternate identity nights,” as Adams calls them, defined by a total (albeit temporary) rebrand that demands an all-hands-on-deck effort from the front office. “It’ll touch ticket sales, merchandise, game presentation, every area of the business,” Adams says. “It’s one of those nights that’ll take a couple months to develop.”

In Double-A baseball, the Erie SeaWolves have doubled as the Erie Pepperoni Balls, the Akron RubberDucks as the Akron Sauerkraut Balls, the Wichita Wind Surge as the Wichita Chili Buns, and the Somerset Patriots as the Jersey Diners. Last year, the G League’s Cleveland Charge were recast as the Cleveland Rocks, complete with a pet rock mascot. Earlier this month, nodding to the Springfield Isotopes baseball squad from the fictional city of Springfield in The Simpsons, the AHL’s Springfield Thunderbirds morphed into the Ice-O-Topes for a fifth straight season.

While an eye-catching logo or a funny name can lead to fleeting internet fame, the point of these alternate identity nights isn’t to go viral—rather, as with minor league sports in general, it’s all about the live experience. “We want you to walk in and know that you’re at a Cleveland Pierogies game that feels different than anything else we’ll do for the rest of the season,” Adams says.

Fans can’t seem to get enough. In addition to this season’s Pierogies turn, the Monsters have annually played as the Cleveland Lumberjacks since 2023, teleporting back in time to adopt the identity of the city’s former International Hockey League franchise, which ran from 1992 to 2000. During the most recent “Lumberjacks Weekend,” held Jan. 31 to Feb. 1, the team’s per-night attendance was 15,569—up 42.3% from its current season average. 

“Whenever we go all in on theme nights,” Adams says, “we see it pay off across the board.”

For clubs adopting a new identity, the transformation often starts with settling on a name and creating a logo.

In 2017, the Double-A Reading Fightin Phils played a game as the Reading Whoopies in showcase of the whoopie pie dessert, which reputedly hails from Pennsylvania’s Americana region. The event caught the attention of a fellow Eastern League team, the Hartford Yard Goats, whose business and marketing staff soon began conceiving their own version of a locally inspired food moniker.

“The first thing that came up was pizza, the second was lobster rolls, the third was the steamed cheeseburger,” Yard Goats president Tim Restall tells FOS. And so, the following year, the Yard Goats took the diamond as the Steamed Cheeseburgers, representing the Connecticut invention—a meat patty that’s steamed instead of grilled—with an image of a steaming-mad burger mascot on their jerseys and hats with a wraparound design that made it look like players were sporting buns on their heads.

“Alternate identity is the catchphrase, but really it’s a chance to highlight something from the community that the team’s going to play for,” Restall says. 

This baseball season, as the result of another staff-wide “brainstorming session,” Restall says, the Yard Goats will adopt two interim identities: the Thunder Chickens (a nickname for wild turkeys, of which there are tens of thousands in Connecticut, owing to the thunderous gobbling sound they make), and the Leaf Peepers (after the countless foliage-gawking tourists who flood the state every fall). For the latter, Restall adds, “We probably went through 10 different versions of the logo before we found the one that we like.” 

But the work behind staging a successful short-term rebrand extends far beyond figuring out the look and lettering of what fans will see on the field. “From that point, you go into merchandise, social media planning, how you’re going to market the team,” Restall says. “Then all the other things that can go around the experience at the ballpark.” Along those lines, as the Yard Goats drew inspiration from an old state blue law—banning the sale of pickles that don’t bounce—to become the Hartford Bouncing Pickles in 2023, stadium vendors offered, among other briny snacks, pickle-flavored cotton candy.

It all adds up to a process that is far from business as usual. Then again minor league sports is anything but a usual business. On one hand, budgets and staff sizes are significantly smaller than those of their major league counterparts. On the other, despite these limited resources, the creative freedom to stretch the limits with offbeat marketing campaigns is often much greater.

“When you have 69 home games and you’re trying to create smiles on fans’ faces every single night, this is just another unique way to do it,” Restall says. “We all play baseball, but in the major leagues, there’s a different emphasis. For us, it’s more about the fan experience.”

Embracing local eccentricities is one way to engage potential ticket-buyers. The Huntsville Havoc of the independent Southern Professional Hockey League took things further in 2022, letting fans vote on the team’s name for a game. The winner was the Madison County Mystery Booms, a reference to the explosive sounds often heard coming from the Alabama region’s U.S. Army base.

Today the Havoc continue to schedule numerous promo nights for which players wear specialty jerseys—including, among others this season, ones highlighting Peter Pan, the Grateful Dead, and outer space. But the team hasn’t executed a wholesale identity change since then.

“I wouldn’t say we’ll never do it again, but it’s just something that we haven’t felt the need or desire to do recently,” VP of marketing Clay Gully says. “We still change it up, like giving our [wolf] logo a badge and a bandana for ‘Scout Night.’ There’s definitely pros and cons, and we just see more pros from keeping our current brand in there and having fun with it.”

Because the change lasts for only a night or two, alternate identities typically don’t run the risk of incurring fan blowback—or, in the case of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Single-A affiliate last year, finding out that the team’s new name carried a sexually racy double-meaning—the way permanent rebrands can. Rather, the biggest realistic downside is that the new concept simply fails to resonate with fans, that the limited-edition juice isn’t worth the months-long squeeze.

Not every idea goes over well internally, either, especially with those whose identity is actually changing. “There’s times when players and coaches will be like, ‘This is the most hideous shirt I’ve ever worn,’” Restall says. “I think the steamed cheeseburger was the least popular. The Leaf Peepers jersey is busy, all different-colored leaves. I’m looking forward to hearing what they think of that.” 

Best-case scenario, though, the concept catches fire, strong ticket sales follow, and special-run merchandise flies off the virtual shelves at the internet team store, altogether strengthening the club’s actual brand. Game-worn theme uniforms are typically auctioned off for charity, another key indicator of a successful alternate identity night. “If we have a jersey we’re auctioning, I can tell how good it is because players will ask if their parents can bid on it, or if they can keep it,” Restall says.

Monsters skaters will soon receive their dumpling-clad Cleveland Pierogies game attire, at which point Adams expects an uptick in fan and media attention focusing on the transformation. “People really start to engage with the night once you start to see the jerseys,” the CMO says. 

But that is merely one of many details that need to be finalized before early April. To that end, Adams reports that “our retail team just found some pierogi foam hats, which I’m really excited about. It’s trending towards being a big weekend for us.”

He adds, “Makes it easier to justify all the time spent on changing your identity when you get a couple games out of it, too.”