Dayton Dragons Baseball Hat Cap MILB Cincinnati Reds Adjustable Embroidered ?The history of the Dayton area is so rife with aviation themes,? said Eric Deutsch, executive vice president of the Dayton Dragons, single-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. ?We kind of went a different direction to change it up a little bit. Dragons are fun. They?re a mythological creature.? So Dayton is all about flying and dragons fly, but there are reasons beyond a connection to aviation that the Dragons chose their name. For one, Deutsch explained, the team wanted to stand out from the crowd a bit. ?Dragons had not been found in a lot of other teams in our sports landscape across North America,? he said. ?It was a different name.? The Dragons stand out particularly because they play in the Midwest League, where many of the other teams? identities are based on local industry or lore, like the Lansing Lugnuts, Cedar Rapids Kernels, and Clinton LumberKings, to name a few. It?s easy to take note of a fantastical creature, specifically one that?s artfully drawn rather than cartoonish, when they?re playing against the Fort Wayne TinCaps or the Quad Cities River Bandits. While the name Dragons is not terribly common, one of the reasons for it can be found throughout sports. ?The alliteration of the letter D worked out very nicely,? Deutsch said. The Dragons? name was chosen by the team?s ownership group?not by a name-the-team contest, as is so often the case with minor league baseball teams. As the team prepared to launch before the 2000 season (the Chinese year of the Dragon, coincidentally), time was running out to get all of the appropriate paperwork and approvals processed