What’s wrong with “Warthogs?”

Remember how, in the early 90s, team nicknames took a turn towards the intangible? The Heat and the Magic spring to mind, but there were many others.

I thought the trend had died, but the renaming of the Supersonics (itself a rather conceptual nickname) to the “Thunder” seems to have revived this ugly business. Now it’s extending to baseball:

So long, Warthogs. The Twin City’s minor-league baseball team has a new name — the Winston-Salem Dash.

Kevin Terry, the team’s president who came on board over the summer with a new management group, Los Angeles-based Mandalay Sports Entertainment, said the Dash provided the best marketing and merchandising options among the five names considered as finalists.

“There’s a good community tie-in (because of the hyphen in the city’s name), and it has that connotation of speed that goes right along with baseball,” Terry said.

Ugh. And it gets better! According to the article “Mandalay’s own graphic designers did most of the work on the new purple, black and silver logo.”

I assume that by “silver,” they meant “teal.”