Opposition to the name and the logo was renewed last week during the American League Championship Series in Toronto when Douglas Cardinal, an indigenous Canadian activist, sought a last-minute court injunction to prevent the team from using uniforms depicting the Indians’ name or the Chief Wahoo logo while in Toronto. * Note: This is an old story - from last week - but it’s just surfacing to many of us now due to ESPN and the Associated Press picking it up.The Cleveland Indians are returning to the World Series for the first time in 19 years on Tuesday, and with that will come renewed protests over the team’s name and Chief Wahoo logo, a depiction some consider a highly offensive caricature. More generally, most of the initial merch available following the ALCS - especially the stuff the team wore on the field during the celebration - was Block-C merch, not Wahoo merch. For one thing, MLB would presumably sell Chief Wahoo stuff to people in other countries, so it’s not like it’d be letting the secret of its racist uncle out of the closet. My first thought when I saw this was that maybe MLB did not want to send a bunch of shirts with Chief Wahoo on it to foreign lands - what is acceptable in Ohio is not necessarily acceptable elsewhere - but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. exactly zero reports suggesting this has ever been a serious problem. No word on how, say, 2015 Mets championship caps or 2011 Rangers championship shirts have created marketplace chaos, but it’s worth noting that we’ve seen. “The reason is to protect the team from inaccurate merchandise being available or visible in the general marketplace.” “In past years we have used World Vision, but we have moved our policy to destroying the merchandise,” MLB’s Matt Bourne told HuffPost. Why waste perfectly good clothing, right? Welp, this year MLB has changed tack with respect to the would-be Indians World Series items: The Huffington Post reports* Major League Baseball is asking retailers to give back Indians championship gear so it can be destroyed. Since 2005, that erroneous gear has been donated to the poor in other countries via charities such as World Vision. When one team wins, MLB quickly gathers up all the erroneous championship gear. That way they can break it out for the on-field celebration and get it quickly into stores. As most people know by now, Major League Baseball and its clothing and cap partners print up “World Series Champs” gear for both teams in the World Series.

Indians 2016 world series baseball cap