(Bloomberg) -- Major League Baseball's Cleveland Indians will be known as the Cleveland Guardians beginning in 2022, after saying last year that the team would review the name it's had for more than a century.
The team announced the name change in a video posted Friday morning. It also has a new logo: a winged baseball adorned with the letter G.
The franchise in December said it would talk with stakeholders and the community to determine whether it would change the name. A year before, it stopped using the Chief Wahoo mascot, a Native American caricature, after longstanding criticism.
In the video, narrated by Tom Hanks, the team nodded to its history and called for unity.
“And now it's time to unite as one family, one community, to build the next era for this team and this city,” the actor says.
| Now Playing for Cleveland... |
|---|
| Guardians, 2022- |
| Indians, 1915-2021 (for Louis Sockalexis, on an earlier local team) |
| Molly McGuires, 1912-1914 (or Molly Maguires, popularly still the Naps) |
| Naps, 1903-1911 (for player-manager Napoleon “Nap” Lajoie) |
| Broncos, 1902 |
| Blues/Bluebirds, 1901 |
| Source: Case Western Reserve University |
Sports franchises have reconsidered their Native American team names in recent years, leading some prominent teams to select new monikers, including what are now the National Football League's Washington Football Team and the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Elks.
Baseball's other team with a Native American name, the Atlanta Braves, has resisted altering its name, as have the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs.
Internal discussions in Cleveland over the name have continued for the past year as management looked at a long list of potential choices before landing on Guardians.
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