Wind Scourge: Wichita’s new baseball team name doesn’t blow us away
After Wichita’s new Triple-A baseball team announced its name and logo Wednesday, it didn’t take long for residents to share their opinions:
And they call the Wind Surge pariah.
“I think that if you and I were drunk, high and having periodic grand mal seizures, we could come up with a dozen better names in half an hour,” my friend Matt wrote on my Facebook page.
“I have wind surge after drinking beer and eating tacos,” another friend wrote.
“Lame.”
“Disappointing.”
“The worst.”
“I’m embarrassed for y’all.”
And oh, the fart jokes. Even hometown sweetheart Kirstie Alley joined the chorus:
After months of speculation — during which the organization formerly known as Wichita Baseball 2020 floated four possible team names and two more logos — the Wind Surge name and winged horse logo seemed to fly in out of the blue.
I remember a conversation I had with Mayor Jeff Longwell in February, during which he said his idea for Wichita’s new ball team was Pegasus, in honor of the Boeing KC-46 tankers that landed at McConnell Air Force Base earlier this year.
On Thursday, Longwell denied any involvement in the team name or logo.
“Nope,” he said in an e-mail. “All of the naming was done by the team.”
What is a wind surge? It’s a coastal term — a rise in water level along a coastline that’s caused by heavy winds, like a storm surge during a hurricane. Makes no regional sense, considering Wichita is about as landlocked as you can get.
So the name isn’t great. It’s also not so bad that it’s great, in the realm of the Savannah Bananas, or the Hartford Yard Goats, or my personal favorite, the Rocket City Trash Pandas.
But despite a Change.org petition that by 2:30 p.m. Thursday had more than 7,000 signatures, it looks like the Wind Surge might be here to stay. For one thing, there’s a store across the street from the ball park construction site that’s full of Wind Surge and Pegasus merchandise.
It’s understandable that many Wichitans — even baseball enthusiasts — feel betrayed by the process that brought us the Wind Surge. Unlike the Trash Pandas team in Madison, Alabama, which decided its name with a public online vote, the months-long rollout of potential Wichita names seems insincere and meaningless.
Why gauge public opinion on the River Riders, 29’ers, Linemen or Doo-dahs if they were never in the running? How can you inspire passion for a team if local fans don’t feel a sense of involvement or ownership?
Unfortunately, the name seems like it’s just another chapter in the series of backroom deals and secret negotiations that brought the baseball team and its downtown stadium to Wichita.
All we can do now, I suppose, is embrace the Wind Surge in all its flatulent glory.
Team cheer? Let’s blow raspberries.
When the opposing team takes the field, our JumboTron could feature the scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” in which a French character portrayed by John Cleese shouts, “I fart in your general direction.”
As for our new Pegasus mascot, perhaps it could be recycled from the old Wichita Wranglers one: Stick some blue wings on Wilbur Wrangler, give him a new jersey, and call it good.
Some Wichitans predict that new name may grow on us, and that could be the case. Not everyone loved the Wingnuts when their name and logo were first introduced.
For now, though, of the Wind Surge — not a big fan.
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 12:57 PM.
