All 30 MLB teams revealed their 2017 hashtags for Opening Day. And they, like so many players today, collectively swung and missed.
Today is Opening Day in baseball. Well, sort of. There were games yesterday, so it was Opening Day, but today is too. And I suppose that’s fine, since nothing happens when it’s supposed to happen anymore: The Fall Classic now goes deep into winter, March Madness wraps up in April, the NFL Draft is three days long, and the 2013 Baseketball NBA Playoffs are on pace to end sometime around next December (I think LeBron and Miami are going to win it all).
And with the start of baseball, Twitter just revealed all 30 Major League Baseball teams’ official hashtags. If you use these specific hashtags, a special emoji of the team’s logo will appear next to it.
Unfortunately, virtually all of the hashtags smack of either 15 suits spending three full days around a whiteboard. (With a few exceptions, that I’ll get into.)
Here are all 30 official MLB hashtags for 2017, ranked from mediocre to terrible.
1 | #RaysUp – Tampa Bay Rays
A viable rallying cry that’s also a pun? Bravo, Tampa Bay. Who says small market teams can’t compete for the best marketing interns?
2 | #ThisIsMyCrew – Milwaukee Brewers
It’s a little long, but it plays off the well-established “Brew Crew” nickname and shouldn’t make fans recoil as they use it.
3 | #LetsGoBucs – Pittsburgh Pirates
Inexplicably, the Pirates are the only team, out of 30, that went for an Occam’s razor hashtag. LetsGo plus a well-established, popular, commonly-used nickname. Everyone else either tried to be too cute or didn’t get creative enough.
4 | #LetsRise – Toronto Blue Jays
This hashtag gets the fourth spot, basically, for being perfectly fine. Not inspired. Not terrible. Just fine.
5 | #RockiesEveryday – Colorado Rockies
Almost makes Rockies fandom sound like a chore.
6 | #TheHaloWay – Los Angeles Angels
I’m not sure any fans will use this hashtag, but it’s more or less passable.
7 | #RootedInOakland – Oakland A’s
So apparently the A’s strategy for rallying their fanbase this year is to remind them the Raiders and Warriors are leaving? “Hey you, guy with the head tattoo, come on by. You got no one left to cheer for!”
8 | #RallyTogether – Cleveland Indians
It’s a bit generic, but it does inoffensively sum up the team’s gum-and-shoelaces 2016 playoff run and fans’ Cleveland-vs.-All mentality.
9 | #WeAreSF – San Francisco Giants
Literally as I was working on this list, I saw a Giants fan on Twitter talking about yesterday’s game and using the hashtag “#GoGiants.”
10 | #ChopOn – Atlanta Braves
Cleveland seems to have consciously avoided words that could evoke any Native American imagery in its hashtag. Atlanta, on the other hand — no qualms!
11 | #GoPhils – Philadelphia Phillies
The hashtag is more or less fine, but I think it will lose some of its trending potential by fans using the similar, logical, but officially incorrect #GoPhillies instead.
12 | #SoxGameday – Chicago White Sox
It could be a tough year for the Chicago White Sox, but if they keep using this hashtag, maybe Lee Corso and Desmond Howard will broadcast from outside their stadium on a week with so-so SEC games.
13 | #BirdLand – Baltimore Orioles
From a brief investigation, it appears the Orioles (and occasionally the media or the fans) do use the term “Birdland.” It doesn’t seem particularly common, though, so this may be a “trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” situation.
14 | #BronxBombersAreBack – New York Yankees
Why couldn’t they just go with “#BronxBombers”? It’s classic, tight and actually sends the same message without needing to add the extraneous words “AreBack.”
15 | #OurSeason – Arizona Diamondbacks
And sure, said season will probably wind up around .500, but it’s OURS.
16 | #LGM – New York Mets
I’m pretty sure if they checked Craigslist’s Casual Encounters, they’d find the acronym LGM stands for something other than “Let’s Go Mets.”
17 | #LetsGoDodgers – Los Angeles Dodgers
Ultra generic.
18 | #LetsGoPadres – San Diego Padres
Ultra generic, and, even worse for their insecurity, little brother-ish to Los Angeles.
19 | #LetsGoFish – Miami Marlins
Quite the contract to Pittsburgh’s “#LetsGoBucs.” I’m pretty sure the Marlins fans haven’t embraced the “Fish” nickname, although I haven’t spoken to either of them recently.
20 | #STLCards – St. Louis Cardinals
“Let’s just use our team name, but throw the city abbreviation on there to make it harder to remember.”
21 | #MNTwins – Minnesota Twins
“Hey, good idea, Cardinals.”
22 | #Astros – Houston Astros
If The Simpsons did a bit where characters picked their own hashtag, Ralph would most likely go with #Ralph. The Astros are, apparently, Ralph Wiggum.
23 | #Reds – Cincinnati Reds
So are the Reds.
24 | #Nats – Washington Nationals
So are the Nationals, but they’re Ralph giving himself the nickname “Ral.”
25 | #RaisedRoyal – Kansas City Royals
Ask yourself: Will ANY fan (1) remember or (2) actually use this hashtag? In this case, they probably should’ve just gone “#Royals.”
26 | #WelcomeBackBaseball – Seattle Mariners
This is aggressively generic — and way worse than just going with “#Mariners.” Are they trying to capitalize on people tweeting “#WelcomeBackBaseball,” then seeing the Mariners logo show up, thinking, “Hmm, you know what, I SHOULD become a Mariners fan”? Because that seems… unlikely.
27 | #LonestarGrit – Texas Rangers
It’s like the opposite of Seattle. Instead of going too generic, Texas went to the other extreme: An attempt at an overthought, two-word parochial poem.
28 | #WinDanceRepeat – Boston Red Sox
There’s so much wrong to unpack here. First, no one refers to the World Series as the “Big Dance.” That’s what people call March Madness. Or the Dancing With the Stars finale, probably. It’s not like a team wins the World Series and Joe Buck starts screaming, “They’ve gone dancing!” Second, the Red Sox don’t have anything to repeat. They didn’t win last year, so what are they repeating? A first-round playoff exit? They tend to go anywhere from three to 96 years between “repeating” championships. Third, they just spent $1 billion on pitchers and ripped off their slogan from a shampoo bottle.
29 | #ThatsCub – Chicago Cubs
You just won your first championship in more than a century. How do you celebrate? Apparently by crafting a marketing slogan that’s like a poor ripoff of That’s So Raven. Their fans all already use the hashtag “#FlyTheW.” Was this really the moment in franchise history to reinvent the wheel?
30 | #WhosYourTiger – Detroit Tigers
Um… am I supposed to cheer for you or let you have your way with me?