Roller derby team sues MLB team over nickname

A roller derby 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, writes Mark Gillespie of The Associated Press.

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

The Cleveland Indians announced in July that 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 influenced by 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 Cleveland 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 on 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 considering 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 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 the Guardians name.

Negotiations between the two teams over rights to the name began after the baseball team’s July announcement and broke down on Tuesday, the lawsuit said.

The Cleveland Indians’ name change is scheduled to become official in the middle of November.