When McCreamy, the muscular mascot of the Danville Dairy Daddies, was unveiled, it was no accident. The collegiate summer baseball team in Virginia knew exactly what it was doing. There was a story behind the team’s name, a thought process behind its color palette and an award-winning designer behind its logo.

Such is the case for many of the teams with eccentric names in the minors and collegiate summer leagues in recent years. The magic lies in the quirks that tie the clubs to their communities. That is how a topless bull came to represent a team in Pittsylvania County, which has three of the five largest dairy farms in Virginia.

“Dairy Daddies” was initially suggested to general manager Austin Scher as a potential name for Danville’s first collegiate summer team, the Otterbots, in 2021. Over the next three years, the alliteration stuck in Scher’s head. “While it is quirky and silly and somewhat tongue in cheek, there is a very real community connection,” Scher said.

“The blue and pink are designed to elicit feelings of newness, of birth, of rebirth. You see those two colors together and you might think of a gender reveal party or a nursery. Then you look at this muscle-bound cow, and you’re thinking: ‘Well, that’s not a baby.

That’s very much full grown.’ Danville and all of southern Virginia are in the middle of this massive resurgence.” The Dairy Daddies are just the latest in a long line of lower-league baseball teams that shirk traditional n.