How a Hamilton Baseball Club Found Itself at Odds with the St. Louis Cardinals

Just weeks ahead of its first game in the inaugural Canadian Baseball League (CBL) season, the Hamilton Cardinals are engaged in a fierce – and unlikely – battle off the field with an MLB team: the St. Louis Cardinals. The Hamilton club has been around since 1958 and adopted the Cardinals moniker in 2012. St. Louis initiated its legal objection to Hamilton’s logo in June 2025.

The New Hamilton Cardinals Logo

While Hamilton has had the Cardinals name since a 2012 rebranding, its recent logo change is what caught the attention of the MLB club with which it shares its name. New majority owner Eric Spearin, who took over the baseball club in September 2022, wanted to give the Cardinals a fresh look with what he said was more of a “Hamilton-specific logo.”

“The Cardinals name remained the same, but yeah, we created a cardinal with a bat over its shoulder, and the bat weight is in the shape of a hammer, of course, for Hamilton,” Spearin told CTV News Toronto.

Hamilton is affectionately known as the “Steel City.”

The Crux of the Issue

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the St. Louis Cardinals took note of the branding more than two years later, coinciding with the announcement of the launch of the CBL, a nine-team league with all teams based in Ontario. Interestingly, another team – the Toronto Maple Leafs – share a name with the province’s most popular NHL team.

The Hamilton ball club filed a trademark application for the logo with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in 2023. The application was approved, despite the St. Louis Cardinals having secured Canadian trademark registrations for many iterations of its logos decades prior. 

The St. Louis Cardinals filed a statement of opposition for the trademark application June 5, 2025, citing that the Hamilton club was capitalizing on the “reputation and goodwill” of the Missouri team’s trademark. The St. Louis side also pointed out how the Hamilton club “coincidentally” changed its name one year after the Cardinals won the World Series.

What Happens Next

Regardless of St. Louis’ opposition, the Hamilton Cardinals in Canada will begin their 2026 season with the Cardinals name and logo. The MLB club has until June 26 to file more evidence and Hamilton begins its season May 15 at home against the Kitchener Panthers.

While Spearin said it “would be nice” if the two sides could come to some sort of amicable agreement, he reiterated that Hamilton will go down swinging if it has to.

“We don’t want to change our team name or team logo at all. We haven’t even really thought that far because we do believe pretty strongly in our position.”