Whaddya Say We Name A Stadium?

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash.

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash.

Okay, it’s Wednesday and it’s already been a hectic week, so it’s time for a little fun.

A friend shared a Twitter post last week where the tweeter was asking for names for the Atlanta Braves’ new stadium, scheduled to open this year.

(And is it just me, or do the Braves get a new stadium every five years or so? I mean, the cheesy grits weren’t even cold at the last stadium, and now it’s time to move again.)

Some of the names were good (“Moon Pie Field,” “The Waffle House”) and some were less good (“Adobe”), which made me think: This is a perfect job for a neural network.

You might remember I tried this once before, with baseball nicknames. This time I found a short list of stadium nicknames somewhere, and fed it into all-time time-suck Talk to Transformer.

TTT did not fail me. It came up with a fine lot of stadium names, which I’ll share in bulk momentarily. But first, a few observations.

The net was pretty sure it was naming video games. There were a bunch of names that were obviously from video games:

  • Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

  • New Super Luigi U

  • New Super Mario Bros. U

  • Super Mario Maker

  • Yoshi's New Island

  • Yoshi's Woolly World

And then there were some that if they weren’t video-game-related would make awesome video games – or death-metal bands:

  • Cypher-4D

  • Dark Arisen

  • Death-Rundown

  • Demons vs Demons

  • Demons vs Demons

  • Demons VS Human

  • Demons vs Humans

  • Demons VS Humans (1 of 16)

There was also a general obsession with zombies and dogs:

  • Zombi 2

  • Zombi3

  • Zombi4

  • Zombi5

  • Zombicide 2

  • Zombie Apocalypse

  • Zombie City

  • Zombie Island

  • Zombie Island (of Takayama)

  • Zombie Rock Shop

  • Zombie Town

  • Zombie Wombat

  • Zombies

  • Zombieville 

  • Zombine

  • Dog Heaven 1

  • Dog Heaven 2

  • Dog Heaven 3

  • Dog Heaven 4

  • Dog Heaven Series 10

  • Dog Heaven Series 11

  • Dog Heaven Series 2

  • Dog Heaven Series 4

  • Dog Heaven Series 6

  • Dog Heaven Series 7

  • Dog Heaven Series 8

  • Dog Heaven Series 9

  • Dogs

And there was the run-of-the-mill weird crap:

  • Charming Larceny

  • Coffee, a Wonderful Life

  • Dr. Hibbert's Pizzicato School of Performing Arts

  • The Adventures of the Wily Moogly Show (American cartoon)

  • Harlem's Most Sacred Ground

  • The Family That Could Be Your Life

  • West Side Story (of Springfield Elementary School) (of Homer Simpson's Springfield)

  • YMCA (in the old house at the top of the hill - where you climb up the hill and head through the wooden door)

While I would be more than good with any of these as a name for a multi-million-dollar baseball stadium, I am not the target audience, so we press on.

After sifting through hundreds of names, here are my choices for the top five names for the Braves’ new stadium, as created by the neural net:

5) The Garden of Fear. It’s got everything: scary images and topiary – you know, something with a nice layered effect. (RIP Terry Jones.)

4) Yuppie Land. Truth in advertising, y’all.

3) The Whipping Post. Gotta love the Allman Brothers reference.

2) Vancouver. Also, “West Virginia.”

1) The Frying Pan. Can you not hear the announcer, on a blazing Hotlanta Sunday afternoon, saying, “And welcome to The Frying Pan, where we expect the visiting New York Mets to be jumping into the fire before long”? Perfect.

If none of those trip your stadium-naming trigger, consider these:

  • A House Divided

  • Alley of Shame

  • Bad Moon Rising

  • Escape from New York

  • Kung Fu Temple

  • Pork Chop Express

  • Punchout

  • The Boneyard

  • The Book of Mormon

  • The Boondocks

  • The Burrow

  • The Curse House

  • The Dried Meat

  • The Dump

  • The Wicked Womb

  • The Gnat Pit

  • The Heart of the Dead City

  • The Horror Tower

  • The House of Pain

  • The Haunted Swamp

  • The Meat Market

  • The Nightmare Before Christmas

  • The Nightmare on Elm Street

  • The Wasteland

  • The Wham-O-Poo

  • The Whirly Dirly

  • The White House (of a House)

  • The Whore of Babylon

  • The Wizard's Cave

  • The World's End

  • The World's Most Exciting Attraction

  • The Wreck

  • Toxic Mountain (Tomb of Fear) [Raft Video]

  • Unfair

  • Waste of Space

  • We Are the Best!

  • Wham-O-Goon

  • Yee Haw

  • Yooka-Laylee

  • Bubba Bubba

I look forward to discussing these further with the stadium-naming Powers That Be while waiting for my check to arrive. In the meantime, best stay out of The Gnat Pit unless you’re wantin’ a whuppin’.

Happy Wednesday.

SportsKit KieferBaseball, Artificial IntelligenceComment