Teams Name Themselves at Last

With the absence of team jerseys this fall, team names took on the role of arriving the week of finals. Indeed, all the teams have a unique moniker, and the players can finally embrace their cooperative (though quickly fleeting) identities.

Let’s take a look at the results.

Wrath of Grapes

Liz met Jake at the draft and told him all her teams are purple. He agreed but insisted they plagiarize Steinbeck and a Rec League team from 2014. They compromised, swapped the nouns, and personified some berries. Delightful! Angry!

Then they grabbed 10 rookies off the draft board, and dumped them into the bottom seed. Welcome to Mud League!

Finals is a fine time to use that wrath and take revenge on these teams that keep beating you. And geez, Liz: this summer it was Terror, now it’s Wrath. What’s next?

What We Do in the Shadows Is Spooky Swing the Disc

Allie and Chloe chose black as their color at the draft, but went metaphorical with their name. They took inspiration from the main commercial holiday of October, and obviously from a popular television show. Other teams Allie has captained follow this pattern of proving they are aware of and enjoying the current trendy thing. However, this is Allie’s first Mixed team not named specifically after a beverage.

This dark team is the fifth seed, and you wonder if that is a purposeful, on-brand, attempt at a rise-from-the-grave move.

They do have the longest name with the most words in Mud history, and their non-grammatical but quite literal inclusion of an ultimate term is charming if not progressive. We are with you Allie and Chloe. Pile it on! Forgo the adverb! Depunctuate the sentence!

Vanilla Bean Badass

Avery and Marikje’s strong offering to the name pool is a phrase more than one of us have uttered while hovering over the freezer at our bodega. This team in white is frozen in the fourth seed for now.

The Beans’ season has matched the oxymoron in their name. When they play the last place Grapes, they’re badass. When they play any other team, they’re pretty vanilla. The slight exception is their week-one win over the Ö Cult, the first opening-day forfeit win since fall 2018.

They’ll have to prove they deserve that middle seed when they face Spooky on Saturday. And it will certainly be badass if another four seed wins finals. It has only happened once.

Blue Öyster Cultimate

Kylie finally brought Jon onboard this fall in order to name her team after their shared passion for what passed as heavy metal in the 1970s. Of course, Kylie and Jon also felt their team was represented by the origin of that band’s name, which is a poem about a gang of aliens who get together to discreetly influence human history. Is this what the blue team has been doing all season? If so, how did they end up as the third seed?

And if this name seems familiar that’s because you’ve been on a blue team before and somebody suggested it in the naming huddle. Even so, of the 18 teams in Mud’s history that have included “blue” in their name, this is the only öyster cult (+ obligatory disc pun).

Did you know Kylie and Jon met at an intermediate cowbell class on the upper west side?

Team BM

Ben and Mickey need to get their name together quickly for a few reasons. The auto-generated one based on their initials seems both really messy and way too intimate. The team is the second seed, but are they really that in-sync?

Also, just look around. The bar is pretty low. You could win this league by throwing a couple random if not made up words together. And winning with your current name might leave a nasty stain on the league.

Your teammates have followed you all the way to Van Cortlandt, they’ve come through at 9:30am games, they stuck with you through choosing yellow. Give them their collective persona. Tell them who they are!

Red Rocks Rocky Socks

David and Ivy didn’t have much say here. Everyone knows if you draft Mateo, his seven-year-old gets to name the team. At least the kid comes to games and keeps score. Maybe that’s why the Rocks are the top seed.

Thank goodness they don’t spell socks with an “x.” What is a rocky sock anyway? Is what you get when you walk to the fields at Van Cortlandt?

Let’s find out AT FINALS on Saturday, November 19th! First games start at 9:45am.