History RSS

Three weeks into the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League's first season, in June 1903, the Western Sun of Vincennes, Indiana ran a small item under the headline "Their New Names." The new league's teams, the paper noted, had already received a few nicknames from the press and the fans. Hopkinsville had become the Hoppers. Henderson was the Hens, Cairo the Egyptians, Clarksville the Villagers. And for Vincennes, the paper listed two candidates still fighting it out: "Chaney's Pets," after manager H.L. Chaney, and the Alices, after a teenage girl who never existed. Her name was Alice Roussillon, and three years earlier she had been the most famous fictional person in America. In 1900, the Indiana writer Maurice Thompson published Alice of Old Vincennes, a...

In the spring of 1949, the minor league baseball team in Duncan, Oklahoma got a new name stitched across its uniforms in red lettering. Not a bird, not a local industry, not the winner of a fan contest. The team's owner was a man named Otto Utt, and the team became the Duncan Uttmen. Naming a ballclub after a person was not unheard of in that era. Early baseball did it for famous managers and stars: Cleveland played as the Naps for over a decade in honor of player-manager Nap Lajoie, and Brooklyn spent years as the Robins under manager Wilbert Robinson. Company owners got teams named for them too, most famously A.E. Staley, whose Decatur Staleys football team went...