Winston-Salem Dash to become the Hyphens

The City of Winston-Salem and literary scholars have spoken. For one game this season the Dash will be grammatically correct and play as the Winston-Salem Hyphens on May 6 as part of Salute to Winston-Salem!

S-H-O-P 👕: https://t.co/7a1t5nHYQn
B-U-Y 🎟: https://t.co/JEasXO4k9h pic.twitter.com/tcAjfEhxjd

— Winston-Salem Hyphens (@WSDashBaseball) April 20, 2023

“Isn’t it technically a hyphen?”

High-A Winston-Salem staffers have heard this countless times since the team rebranded from the Warthogs to the Dash in 2009. And yes, the “dash” between Winston and Salem is, technically, a hyphen. But the “Hyphens” don’t really make for a good baseball team name.

At least, they didn’t before.

On Saturday, the White Sox affiliate will embrace grammatical accuracy and become the Hyphens for one night only. According to the team website, the name switch will “pay homage to our home-town” which merged together in 1913.

"As we learned what a hyphen really does, instead of breaking up words like a dash, it actually joins them together," Winston-Salem president Brian DeAngelis said. "We're just attempting to join our two cities -- which is now one city -- together. That means bringing our community together."

To the uninitiated, a baseball team called the Dash isn’t anything extraordinary; after all, speedy players dash around the diamond every game. But a little bit of context goes a long way in celebrating the club’s unique moniker.

Winston-Salem has gone through several name and affiliate changes over the years. First they were the Twins, referring to the “twin cities” of Winston and Salem -- and most recently the Warthogs before the opening of a new stadium in 2010 prompted the rebrand. The Winston-Salem Journal conducted a contest to choose the new name, and the Dash was ultimately selected by members of the community.

But in naming the team after punctuation, people were quick to point out the mark was actually a hyphen, not a dash, and the name has been met with complaints for years from fans all around the country.

Other MiLB teams even got in on the roasting, most famously the Myrtle Beach Pelicans' "Punctuation Night" nearly 14 years ago, when ballpark staff wore t-shirts with punctuation marks on them and the team took "great pains to be grammatically correct at all times."

As with every minor controversy, though, the franchise ultimately chose to acknowledge and even satiate the grammar nerds with the Hyphens' name for a night. The club will ultimately be using the night to celebrate the community, featuring different parts of the city throughout the game and even having the mayor proclaim that May 6, 2023 will by "Hyphens Day" in Winston-Salem.

Of course, even with all the honoring of the community, the club will still have fun with it.

"The grammar nerds in particular spearheaded this whole thing, at least the response to it," DeAngelis said. "We pretty much changed our whole in-game show. We're gonna be doing a lot of educational series, meaning like, 'Is it hyphenated or is it not hyphenated?' We're gonna have a little bit of fun with it. Our emcees have been reading the dictionary all week long, so we're ready."