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Love ‘ya Tribe, but Cleveland remains a Browns Town

The Cleveland Indians rolled out their marketing slogan for the 2013 season on Friday.

The updated motto – This is a Tribe town – “captures perfectly the passion we feel for our fans and the community we serve,” Indians president Mark Shapiro said on the team’s website.

The campaign will be backed by a series of videos of Tribe players and personalities explaining why they chose to be a part of the organization and the city of Cleveland, including radio play-by-play man Tom Hamilton, new players Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn, and current coach and former player Sandy Alomar Jr. (no word, yet, on if Swisher’s video will feature him laughing while rolling around on a large pile of money).

The first video features manager Terry Francona saying “I spent the first six years of my life here, going to the stadium with my dad: cheering for the Tribe, cheering for Cleveland. This is a town that doesn’t give up. Being a Cleveland sports fan takes resilience. The passion is real. The fans are real. Cleveland is a Tribe town.”

Francona’s right that it takes a special kind of person to be a Cleveland fan. But as to the rest of the campaign, it comes across more as a team desperate to try and convince itself that Cleveland is a Tribe town, rather than affirming something that everyone already knows.

We don’t mean to dump on the Tribe; they did things in the off-season that got fans talking (and in a good way).

But the truth is the Tribe only got it half right. Cleveland is a baseball town – from the time that school lets out in June until the start of training camp for the Cleveland Browns in late July.

The rest of the year? Unquestionably Browns Town.

(Photo by The Associated Press)