The Los Angeles Dodgers will always be the Dodgers, but their minor league team is set to change their mascot for the upcoming Minor League Baseball Season’s Copa de la Diversión (also known as the Fun Cup).
A part of the Fun Cup – which, according to the MiLB website, consists of events that “embrace the culture and values that resonate most” with Hispanics in communities with minor league teams – is that each club changes their names for the festivities.
In the past, the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes had taken part in the series as the Temblores, which translates to “earthquakes.”
Unfortunately for Quakes fans this time around, the new name picked by officials has a different connotation to it than the team may have hoped for.
The Dodgers’ single-A affiliate announced on social media on Thursday that they would be rebranding to the Chaquetas for the Fun Cup; Chaquetas is Spanish for “jackets” and pays homage to Southern California’s mariachi band culture while extending “beyond those who share the genre’s cultural background.”
“So, when baseball-favorite and Rancho Cucamonga resident Joe Kelly put on that Mariachi jacket and later wore it to the White House, he wasn’t just making an exceptional style choice,” the team said on X, formerly Twitter. “Rather, the pitcher was honoring the music’s most esteemed qualities, many of which it shares with baseball, [including] artistry, dedication, teamwork and ‘the privilege to put on such historically significant uniforms.’”
However, while Chaquetas does literally translate to “jackets” in English, the word has a second – and less appropriate – meaning to it for some Spanish speakers.
The word “chaqueta” can also be slang for masturbation, according to a Los Angeles Times report and the Urban Dictionary.
Mariachi had already taken as another team’s name, the Times said, so team officials started thinking about other ideas and eventually landed on Chaquetas; Quakes executive vice president and general manager Grant Riddle told the L.A. Times that the name was “vetted” through the MLB and local Hispanic community leaders.
“We mailed a mariachi group…our staff [and] families have lots of cultural involvement,” Riddle told the Times. “And everybody was like ‘This is [going to] be incredible!’’
Despite the name being looked over by multiple groups, the team never heard anything about the slang definition of chaquetas, Riddle said, but several fans were quick to point out the blunder.
“It’s been in Ohio as early as the mid-1850s at least, brought in as an ornamental plant because of its unique foliage and white flowers,” Gardner said. “It was actually planted in people’s landscaping, and it has been spreading.”
“We were immediately concerned…have we made an irreversible mistake here?” Riddle said. “And so we immediately…reengaged those groups and determined rather quickly that none of them were aware of it either.”
“Our intention in no form was anything other than the literal translation,” Riddle added. “You know, language is dynamic and there could be words out there that could mean two different things. And the slang is not what it means to us or is it ever what it’s going to mean to us here in this community and the ballpark.”
The team will be wearing their Chaquetas jerseys on April 13 (during replica jersey giveaway night); May 16 (during food and drink night); and July 19 (Joe Kelly bobblehead giveaway night).