In our current era of wokeness, it’s clearly time for all of these racist professional sports logos to go. No, we’re not talking about the Redskins, er… I mean the “Washington Football Team.” Nor are we discussing the Atlanta Braves. This week’s story focuses on the obviously racially insensitive logo of the Major League Baseball Minnesota Twins. The push for a more “inclusive” logo is coming from inside the team’s own clubhouse. Not from one of the players or coaches or even the owners, however. The proposal comes from Dr. Charles Crutchfield, the team’s consulting dermatologist. Let’s see what his complaint is. (CBS Minnesota)

A Twin Cities doctor is urging the Twins to change the team’s classic “Minnie and Paul” logo to reflect the diversity of the team’s players and fans.

Dr. Charles Crutchfield, the Twins’ consulting dermatologist, is asking the Pohlad family, which owns the Twins, to update the iconic logo, which was made in 1961.

“I have always loved Ray Barton’s original ‘Minnie and Paul’ logo design,” Crutchfield said, in a statement. “But the time is now to create a respectful and subtle yet very significant update that honors and reflects the team’s players and its fans from different backgrounds. It’s an easy fix but it’s an important one – and it’s long overdue.”

There are two major questions over Crutchfield’s proposal, but I’ll save the most bizarre one for last. Let’s instead start with the specific complaint about the logo he’s referencing. The traditional depiction (which you can see here) shows a caricature of the twins named “Minnie and Paul.” They are two men in baseball jerseys (two White men, I should add) shaking hands across the Mississippi River. The initials of both Minneapolis and St. Paul are seen on the uniforms.

So how does Crutchfield propose to “fix” the logo? He proposed a new version as part of a Facebook poll he conducted. You can view the revised cartoon here. As you will see, “Paul” has had his skin modified and colored in with a somewhat darker brown or tan hue. So there’s your diversity angle. Fair enough, I suppose. If you’d like one of the “twins” to represent minority players, suit yourself. (Though somebody might want to check with the parents and see if one of their twin children was actually adopted.)

But as I mentioned above, that’s not the real sticking point in Crutchfield’s complaint. You see, the logo he’s talking about hasn’t been used as the official logo of the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise in nearly 35 years. This sports logo history site tracks the evolution of the team’s logo since its inception. The old logo was created by Illustrator Ray Barton (1930 – 2010) in 1960, a task for which he was paid the handsome sum of fifteen dollars. But the last time “Minnie and Paul” were used was in 1986.

Since then they’ve gone on to adopt two different (and far more generic) logos showing a baseball emblazoned with the words “Minnesota Twins Baseball Club.” Granted, the baseball is also white, but the balls used by the league all look like that.

So where is the older version of the logo that has Crutchfield so upset? I went through some Google image searches of the player’s uniforms and the team’s facilities and didn’t see Minnie and Paul in use. A search of their team store and all of the jerseys they sell didn’t offer any with the old logo that I could find either. (To be fair, I didn’t have time to search the entire site, so perhaps it’s buried in there somewhere.) The one place I found the logo was on a rather beat-up looking sign perched up on top of the wall of Target Field near center field.

Is that one sign in center field the only place the logo is left? If so, I suppose some activists could take some chains out there and drag it down. Or perhaps somebody with some brown paint could do what Crutchfield suggests and just go paint Paul’s hands and face brown. But is this really the biggest fish we have left to fry in our ongoing wokeness parade?