Defunct Baseball Team Histories — iowa RSS

Celery, potatoes, corn, salt and peaches all had professional ball clubs named after them, and Natchez, Mississippi, had the Pilgrims. Here is a whole Thanksgiving dinner served by ten real minor league teams, from Kalamazoo's Celery Pickers to the Macon Peaches, with the turkey supplied by the host.

For about seventy years, almost every American town with a rail depot had a professional baseball team, and the nickname was whatever the local paper started calling it. Tomato Pickers, Undertakers, Swamp Angels, Looloos, Forked Deers, Pretzels: here are the nine strangest names on record, all of them real, and the story of where each one came from.