Maryland’s minor league baseball team renamed the Chesapeake Baysox

The Bowie Baysox are becoming the Chesapeake Baysox.

During a Friday presentation in Annapolis and streamed on social media, team officials announced the name change, saying it’s meant to encompass more of the Chesapeake Bay than just the Prince George’s County town of Bowie.

In a video that showed images of Annapolis, Baltimore, Eastern Shore and Bowie, the team said it’s “time for a new chapter in Baysox baseball, for you, for us and for the entire Chesapeake Bay” area. One of the Baysox’s new logos features “a bold crab holding a baseball bat and the Maryland flag,” as described in a press release.

The Baysox, the Orioles’ Double-A team, played their first season in 1993 and were purchased in 2022 by Attain Sports Partners.

Last season, fans from 378 Maryland zip codes (and 1,733 out-of-state zip codes) and each of the state’s counties attended games at Prince George’s Stadium, the ballpark where the team will continue to play, the release said.

Professional sports teams are often identified geographically by the city they play in, but some teams—like the NFL’s New England Patriots or the NBA’s Golden State Warriors—seek to align themselves with a larger area. The Orioles’ Single-A affiliate, the Delmarva Shorebirds, is named after a peninsula rather than the city of Salisbury where it plays.

Vassilis Dalakas, a marketing professor at Cal State University San Marcos who has studied sports branding, said naming a team after a broader area can be beneficial, but it’s difficult to measure.

“Conceptually, most of us would say, yes, it would probably be a good move in the sense that it will be more attractive, geographically, to a large group of people. Empirically, we have no evidence to actually confirm that it is the case,” he said in an interview.

When a team changes geographic names, it’s difficult to isolate the variable to understand whether a name change had an impact on attendance, marketing sales and so on, Dalakas said. Other factors, including availability and ticket prices, likely have a bigger impact than a team name, he said.

The Baysox name change comes about a month after a majority stake in the Orioles’ High-A affiliate, the Aberdeen IronBirds, was purchased by Attain from hometown hero Cal Ripken Jr. and his brother, Billy. Ripken. Both remain part of Ironbird’s ownership group. Ripkens first purchased the minor league team and placed it in Aberdeen in 2001.

The move expanded Attain’s sports footprint in Maryland. In addition to the Baysox and IronBirds, Attain owns the Frederick Keys, a summer league collegiate baseball team, and Loudon United FC, a Virginia-based United Soccer League Championship team. (The ownership group also owns the Spire City Ghost Hounds, an Atlantic League of Professional Baseball team that played its inaugural season in 2023 but has been on hiatus since).

Changes in ownership and marketing of the Orioles’ minor league affiliates come amid a state-funded renaissance of sorts for ballparks across the state. In total, about $300 million was set aside to renovate five ballparks and build a new one in Hagerstown.

The ballpark projects — in Aberdeen, Bowie, Frederick, Salisbury and Waldorf — are at various stages of completion, with the goal of each being upgraded to new standards set by Major League Baseball by 2021.

The state also funded a new ballpark in Hagerstown, which was completed this spring and hosted an Atlantic League team, the Flying Box Cars, this past year.