MLB Roller derby outfit launches suit over 'Guardians' name

A roller derby CLEVELAND — team that has called itself the Cleveland Guardians since 2013 sued the city’s Major League Baseball team in federal court in Cleveland on Wednesday alleging that the switch from Indians to Guardians infringes on its trademark.

“A Major League club cannot simply take a smaller team’s name and use it for itself,” the lawsuit said. “There cannot be two ‘Cleve- land Guardians’ teams in Cleveland, and, to be blunt, Plaintiff was here first.”

The former Cleveland Indians announced in July it would assume the name Guardians for the 2022 season after years of criticism that the Indians name and Chief Wahoo logo were racist. The new name was adopted from the two large Art Deco statues that appear to stand guard on a bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River.

The all-gender roller derby team is based in the Cleve- land suburb of Parma. It formally registered the name Cleveland Guardians in 2017 with the Ohio secretary of state and has been selling team merchandise since 2014, the lawsuit said.

The baseball team did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

In April, the baseball team filed a trademark application for the Guardians name in the East African island nation of Mauritius, “effectively hiding the application unless one knew where to look,” the lawsuit said.

The baseball team contacted the roller derby team in June, telling team officials it was con- sidering using the Guardians name and asked the roller derby team to send a photo of its jersey, the lawsuit said.

When the roller derby team offered to sell the rights to the Guardians name to the baseball team, the former Indians offered to pay a “nominal amount” that the roller derby team rejected, the lawsuit said.

The baseball team subsequently made another trademark filing in Mauritius for the team logo, the lawsuit said. The team also filed two federal trademark applications in July claiming exclusive rights to “Guardians.”

Negot iat ions between the teams over rights to the name began after the baseball team’s July announcement and broke down Tuesday, the lawsuit said.

The roller derby team wants the baseball team to advertise and promote that it would no longer call itself the Guardians with “at least as much effort and resources” used to promote the new name, the lawsuit said.

It also wants the baseball team to establish a fund equal to what the team spends on advertising and promotions if it continues using the Guardians name so the roller derby team can buy “corrective advertising.”