In a landscape where competition for the entertainment dollar is fiercer than ever, baseball’s marketing gurus are always trying to find new ways to grow the game.
The Dodgers Class-A affiliate Rancho Cucamonga Quakes might have inadvertently stumbled upon a stroke of genius.
Emphasis on the stroke.
As part of Minor League Baseball’s annual Copa de la Diversión promotion, the Quakes chose to pay tribute to their Latino fanbase and the southern California tradition of mariachi music at the ballpark by temporarily renaming themselves the Chaquetas.
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“Chaqueta” is the Spanish word for jacket — a reference to the attire worn by mariachi musicians and a famous look that Dodger hero Joe Kelly wore to The White House.
However, “Chaqueta” also has an alternate meaning. As the organization found out from numerous social media replies after making their announcement, the Quakes baseball team had rebranded themselves with a slang word for masturbation.
You’ve got to love it when one national pastime pays tribute to another.
Quakes Executive VP Grant Riddle told the Los Angeles Times’ Chuck Schilken that when they decided on the new nickname, “that gets vetted by Major League Baseball, we engaged our local Hispanic-Latin community in regard to the concept. We mailed a mariachi group. Our staff, families, we have lots of cultural involvement. And everybody was like, ‘This is gonna be incredible!’”
If that was the only response they heard, perhaps the bigger headline of this story should be “No one working for Major League Baseball has ever used Urban Dictionary.”
As Schilken indicated, the Quakes had already been in communication with a mariachi band and will presumably hire them to roam the ballpark when they become the Chaquetas. So for the benefit of any Chaqueta players who want to make requests for walk-up music, “Yo Me Toco a Mí Mismo” is Spanish for “I Touch Myself.”
Now I’m the least qualified person on earth to offer sound business advice. But I think a good rule of 21st-century marketing should be: before choosing a new moniker, search for it on Pornhub first.
Had team executives done that, they would have found a clip entitled “Chaqueta Express” featuring a gentleman who is… uh… enthusiastically demonstrating the alternate definition of the word.
Hey, every team needs their version of the Rally Monkey.
To their credit, even after becoming the subject of Twitter mockery, the Quakes decided to own it and are going forward with the promotion. They’ll be wearing Chaquetas uniforms for games on April 13th, May 16th, and July 19th. Those might just become the best-selling jerseys in all of baseball.
Now all they have to do is find the perfect baseball luminary to throw out the first pitch. I can’t think of a better night to honor former pitching coach Dick Pole.
