On July 15, 1939, the manager of the Class D Williamson Red Birds in Williamson, West Virginia sat down and wrote to the St. Louis Cardinals about one of his pitchers. The pitcher was 18, left-handed, and at that point in the season had lost only two games. The manager, Harrison Wickel, recommended that the Cardinals release him anyway. In the report as it has since been quoted, he called him "the wildest pitcher I have ever seen," then added, almost as a courtesy, that the kid had good habits, was a fine boy, and could hit a little. Nobody outside the Cardinals' front office read it at the time; four years later, when the wire services were writing the player's...
In the spring of 1958, minor league baseball in the Bay Area began dying in plain sight, and everyone knew exactly what was killing it. The major leagues had come to California: the Giants were playing their first season in San Francisco, the Dodgers their first in Los Angeles, and the Class C California League's northern outposts suddenly could not make the math work. In San Jose, the JoSox had drawn a respectable 40,000 fans in 1957 and still lost $11,000. A Reno columnist reported the club's people in a state of shell shock ever since the Giants' westward move landed on their doorstep. In Salinas, the Packers were drawing crowds as small as 171, against the 600 a game...
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...
