Nine real minor league baseball teams, 1887 to the 1970s, with the strangest names on record, and where each one came from.
For about seventy years, from the 1880s into the 1950s, almost every American town with a rail depot and a few thousand people had a professional baseball team. Nobody was thinking about merchandise. A nickname was whatever the local paper started calling the club, and the paper usually reached for the nearest thing: the crop, the factory, the river, the manager's day job. Some of those names were dignified. These nine were not, and every one of them is real.
We make shirts for more than 400 of these types of teams. These are the nine that make people stop and ask if we're joking.
1. Jacksonville Tomato Pickers (Texas)
Jacksonville, Texas, would come to call itself the Tomato Capital of the World, and by the 1930s it had the numbers to back it up: the town shipped tomatoes by the trainload and threw a festival every June to celebrate it. When the East Texas League put a club there in 1916, the paper did not have to think hard. The Jacksonville Tomato Pickers played one short season alongside the Lumbermen, the Cogs and the Governors before the league folded in July, and a tomato with a bat was somehow the least strange thing in the standings.
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2. Des Moines Undertakers (Iowa, 1903)
This is the rare one with a documented origin. Ahead of the 1902 season the men putting together a Des Moines ballclub wired a job offer to a St. Louis mortician named Joe Quinn. Quinn had been the first Australian to play major league baseball and had put in seventeen big league seasons, and he had played for Des Moines as a young pro back in 1888. He took the job, kept the funeral business, and in 1903 the team named itself after his day job. Whether the Des Moines Undertakers name was the club's idea or a sportswriter's joke is a question we haven't yet been able to answer. The team was also called the Prohibitionists and the Underwriters in other seasons, and after winning a Western League pennant it renamed itself the Champions, which is a very on the nose re-brand.
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3. Mobile Swamp Angels (Alabama, 1887)
Mobile's previous ballclub had been named after a patent medicine, the Acid Iron Earths, and had won the only championship its league ever awarded before the league folded after one summer. The city's next team was the Mobile Swamp Angels. Why is a fair question and one we cannot answer: the name shows up in papers across the South in 1887 and, as far as anyone has found, not in Mobile's own. A swamp angel in the 1880s could mean a mosquito, a backwoods swamp dweller or a Civil War cannon, and the Mobile papers never said which one they meant. Our design went with an alligator and a halo, which is a guess, and we say so here.
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4. Moline Plowboys (Illinois)
Moline built plows. John Deere moved his works there in 1848, the Moline Plow Company followed, and by the time the town had a Three-I League club the factories along the Mississippi were turning out more farm implements than anywhere on earth. The nickname was not a joke about farmers; it was the payroll. Moline Plowboys is what the town called its ballplayers in two separate stretches of the Three-I, more than a decade apart, and the name outlasted the plow company.
5. Decatur Commies (Illinois)
The club was the Decatur Commodores, one of the longest-running names in the Three-I League, and the name was perfectly respectable. They were named after Stephen Decatur, the early-1800s U.S. Navy commodore for whom the city was named. The problem was that it did not fit in a headline. Sportswriters shortened it to Commies early and kept using it for decades, through two world wars, the red scare of the 50s, well into the years when the word had come to mean something else entirely. Nobody in Decatur seems to have minded. The Decatur Commies is what the town called the team, and it is what our design says, because that is what the papers said.
6. Dyersburg Forked Deers (Tennessee)
The Forked Deer River runs through Dyersburg on its way to the Mississippi, and when the town got a KITTY League club in the 1920s the paper named it after the river. That is the entire story, and it still produces one of the best names in the catalog, because a forked deer is not an animal and the paper did not care. The KITTY League, properly the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League, was a Class D circuit of small river and railroad towns that formed and folded repeatedly between 1903 and 1955, and the Dyersburg Forked Deers were in it for two of those seasons. Our design gave the deer the forked antlers the name implies and a bat, which the river never had.
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7. Los Angeles Looloos (California, 1902)
A lulu, in 1902 slang, was a dazzler, a knockout, something remarkable. Jim Morley's Los Angeles club in the state's own professional circuit got the name from the papers and spelled it however the typesetter felt like that day. For a few months that spring the biggest lulu on the roster was Rube Waddell, the most talented and least manageable pitcher in the country, who had drifted west and was striking out everyone in sight at Chutes Park. Connie Mack wired him an offer and, by most accounts, sent two Pinkerton men to make sure he got on the train east. Waddell went 24-7 for Philadelphia the rest of that season and led the American League in strikeouts anyway. The Los Angeles Looloos name lasted one year; the club's owners spent the following winter engineering the expansion that created the West Coast's top minor league, which is a different story. We wrote a long blog on the Looloos, if you're interested in a deep dive on this team's story.
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8. South Bend Benders (Indiana, 1911)
The South Bend Benders were a real Central League club and a chaotic one. They took the name in 1911, the year after the South Bend Bronchos won the league with future Hall of Famer Max Carey running wild on the bases. That first Benders season, they moved to Grand Rapids in July and were replaced in South Bend by a team from Evansville that finished the year as the Bux. The Benders came back in 1912, finished last by 36 games, folded, came back again in 1914 in a Michigan circuit, won a title under a different name, and returned to the Central League for 1916 and 1917 before losing a seven-game playoff. The name is a plain pun on the town. The slightly tipsy beer glass on our shirt is our joke, not theirs; there is no record of what the 1911 Benders did after games or what their logo looked like.
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9. Freeport Pretzels (Illinois)
Freeport, Illinois, is Pretzel City. German immigrants brought the bakeries in the 1850s, the high school teams are still the Pretzels, and when the town had a club in the Wisconsin-Illinois League in the early 1900s, the ballplayers were Pretzels too. The baseball Freeport Pretzels did not last: the club moved to a different circuit that folded in midseason, a 1915 revival ended the same way, and professional baseball never came back after that. The Pretzels still taste good.
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None of these names were chosen by a committee, and none of them were trying to be funny. They were what a town was, written down by the one person whose job it was to write it down all those years ago. That is why we make the shirts: every one of them is a real place, a real season and a real score. Every design is ours, drawn from what the record actually shows, and where the record is silent, as it is on the Swamp Angels, we say so.
There are 400 more where these came from.
See every team, A–Z by stateBuy 2 shirts, get the 3rd half off. Any tee, hoodie or crewneck.
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