At the recent PEBA Winter Meetings London Underground owner Cyan Winters announced plans to rebrand the organization’s minor league system starting with their affiliate in the Global Baseball Brotherhood, the Leeds Rhinos. The team will become the Leeds Locomotives effective immediately. The change, according to Winters “aligns the team more closely to the Underground while striving to form a more direct historical connection to their city – which does not have any native Rhinoceros“. This dig underlines a real annoyance Winters has always had with the team, dating back to his days as General Manager. Believing that any sports team in an area should strive to have a real connection to the people that live there, having their team located in the bustling industrial town of Leeds after an animal native only to a continent thousands of miles away always seemed a bit off. Winters set a team of interns on the task of researching the Leeds area to better understand it and to suggest ideas for names that aligned to the area as well as thematically to the Underground, named for the famed subway system in London.

Leeds has a rich history so there was many ideas to choose from, known at varying points through history for being a trade and manufacturing center it has been a major producer of flax, iron, and engineering products. Carbonated water, ever popular across Europe to this day, was invented in Leeds during the 1760s. Several names around this idea, including “Bubbles”, “Gas”, and “Fizzies” were focus grouped but all fell flat. Ironic. Leeds also has several rivers running through as well as a number of smaller watercourses, known locally as becks. There are nearly three dozen of these becks which help enable the city to have a water taxi service. Unfortunately “Becks” sounded like a cheap beer to anyone outside of northern England and it’s not a great name if you always have to explain it. One final thread that was pulled on is the cities tenuous connection with J. R. R. Tolkien and his famed works. Tolkien’s third son was born in Leeds and went on to serve as editor on much of his father’s posthumously published works. However, the initial foray into asking the Tolkien estate about their willingness to work with a minor league baseball team were so vehemently denied that it went no further.

Encouraged by their charge to come up with something that could ideally be connected back to the Underground, the team focused in again on the history of transit in Leeds and quickly found that the railroad had played a huge part in the birth of modern day Leeds, as it had for so many other towns during the Industrial Revolution. The initial rail connections provided Leeds with essential connections to national and international markets via ports across England. Not just a product of the existence of rail, the town was home to several prominent locomotive manufacturers; Kitson and Company (est. 1835) and Hunslet Engine Company (est. 1864) the latter of which would produce locomotives for over 100 years. Feeling as though they were narrowing in on something the team begin to focus group name ideas until Winters got wind of this and put a quick stop to it by proclaiming his own idea the winner. Ever passionate for alliteration in sports, Winters insisted on Locomotives as the next name for Leeds.

From there work shifted to the graphics designers and marketing folks who were still on payroll, the former particularly wiped out by recent layoffs. The designers felt it was important to maintain some continuity between the Rhinos and Locomotives and settled on maintaining familiar blue and yellow colors – although the final product would feature a deeper blue and a more rich, golden yellow. Additionally, the crest of the Underground would make its way into the rebrand, an important piece in underlining the connection between the Underground and their feeder teams. The locomotive itself was styled after typical 19th century steam locomotives operating in Britain, perhaps very similar to those rolling out of the manufacturing plants in Leeds at the time.

A few days after the announcement at the Winter Meetings a press conference was held at Rhino Park to formally unveil the new logo – as well as some other changes. Rhino Park would be renamed The Railyard and would undergo appropriate modifications during the remainder of the offseason to match the new team. Furthermore, a custom steam whistle was manufactured locally and will be installed in the park intended to go off following any Locomotives’ home run and following a win. No structural changes would be made to the stadium and the ballpark dimensions would be unaltered. The main attraction of the press conference was the unveiling of the new logo, which was quickly heralded as a triumph and became the talk of the town.

The team and fans alike hope that the first season as the Locomotives goes better than the disastrous final season of the Rhinos which saw them win just 54 games and finish 26 games back of a playoff spot.