Celery, potatoes, corn, salt and peaches all had professional ball clubs named after them, and Natchez had the Pilgrims. Here is the whole holiday dinner, served by ten real minor league teams, turkey included.
Thanksgiving baseball usually means a pickup game in the yard while the bird is in the oven. This is the other kind. For decades, plenty of minor league teams took their nicknames from whatever the town grew, packed or shipped, and if you read enough old standings you can lay out the entire holiday dinner. The celery came from Kalamazoo. The potatoes came from Idaho Falls and the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The corn came by way of a starch plant in Keokuk, Iowa, and the salt came up from under Hutchinson, Kansas. Every one of those towns named a ball club after it.
We make shirts for more than 400 of these old teams. Ten of them add up to a full Thanksgiving menu, with a host club from Natchez, Mississippi, called the Pilgrims. Most lists of food-named baseball teams stop at the joke. Every name on this one came from a real crop or a real factory, and most of them were a town's paycheck long before they were anything funny.
The host: the Natchez Pilgrims
The Pilgrims arrived late, which is traditional for a guest. The franchise opened the 1940 season in Houma, Louisiana, went 23-43 there, and on June 27 moved north to Natchez, Mississippi, where it finished the year under a new name. That made it one of the few clubs from outside Louisiana in the Evangeline League, the circuit sportswriters called the Tabasco Circuit. The Natchez Pilgrims played one more full season in 1941 and finished seventh both years. In 1942 the club became the Natchez Giants, and the league stopped play on May 30 with the country at war.
We have found no one from 1940 explaining the name. Natchez did have a reason to like the word. Since 1932 the town had been holding the Natchez Pilgrimage, a spring tour of its pre-Civil War mansions that drew visitors from 37 states in its first year and grew from six days to several weeks. Whether the ball club borrowed from that, from Plymouth Rock, or from neither, the record we have seen does not say. Our design put the pilgrim's hat on a turkey, which is our idea and not the town's.
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The relish tray: celery from two Celery Cities
Celery used to be a dinner-party vegetable. Families who could afford it stood the stalks up in glass vases of cold water and passed them around raw. Kalamazoo, Michigan, grew so much of it that it called itself the Celery City. The growing started there in the 1850s, and Dutch immigrant families did most of the work of turning the wet ground north of town into celery fields. A Kalamazoo ball club was already calling itself the Celery Pickers in 1895. The Kalamazoo Celery Pickers on our shirt are the 1920 team, a new club that joined the Central League that year and finished 64-60. It played on through 1926, when it was folded into a merged eight-team league that lasted a single season, and Kalamazoo then went nearly 70 years without a minor league team.
Florida had a Celery City too. A freeze in December 1894 badly damaged the orange groves around Sanford, the growers switched to celery, and by about 1900 the town had the nickname. When central Florida's new Class D circuit opened in 1919, the Sanford Celeryfeds were charter members, and their uniforms carried a logo of celery stalks. They won the league outright in 1926. Two Celery Cities on one table is a lot of celery, which is about right for a relish tray.
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The potatoes: the Idaho Falls Russets and the Parksley Spuds
The russet is the potato sometimes just called an Idaho, the one for baking and mashing. We have not found anyone in 1940 explaining exactly why Idaho Falls named its new club the Russets, but it should be pretty clear anyway. The franchise moved over from Lewiston in November 1939 and opened on April 26, 1940. The Idaho Falls Russets lasted 19 seasons through 1961, with three years off for the war, and won their only league title in 1952. In 1946 they signed an 18-year-old Billy Martin straight out of high school, and he played 32 games at third base for them, as his SABR biography tells it, without hitting much. When the Yankees came back as the parent club in 1962, the team took the Yankees' name.
The sweet potatoes come from Parksley, Virginia, a railroad town on the Eastern Shore with 607 people at the 1920 census. The Parksley Spuds were named for the sweet potatoes grown all around the town, and the smallest town in the Eastern Shore League had the league's most successful team, with pennants in 1922, 1924 and 1927. Before the 1924 Five-State series, Parksley's regular catcher fell ill, so the club borrowed a 16-year-old catcher from the rival Easton club to play for the Spuds. His name was Jimmie Foxx, and in a Parksley uniform he hit .391 with four home runs. Parksley won the series four games to two.
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The corn on the cob: the Keokuk Kernels
No Thanksgiving table is complete without corn on the cob, and the kernels come from Keokuk, Iowa, by way of a factory. The Hubinger Company, one of the town's major employers, made starch from corn and traced its start to a laundry starch J. C. Hubinger developed in the 1870s. When Keokuk joined the Three-I League in 1952, the club took the name Kernels from the starch plant.
The Keokuk Kernels turned out to be very good. Roger Maris came through in 1954, seven years before his 61 home runs. In 1955 the Kernels went 92-34, a .730 winning percentage, and won the league by 22 games. Mudcat Grant went 19-3, Russ Nixon won the batting title, and Pinky May was named the league's manager of the year. In 2001 two baseball historians ranked that club the 30th best minor league team of all time, and SABR has the full story of the 1955 season. Keokuk Kernels is also very hard to say quickly, which we consider part of the appeal.
Salt and bread: Hutchinson, Kansas
Hutchinson had both the bread and the salt. The town sat in the middle of Kansas wheat country, and in 1887 a land promoter named Ben Blanchard went looking for oil there and hit rock salt instead, part of a bed that runs under about 37,000 square miles of Kansas. Salt was being pumped out of it the next year. The ball clubs followed both. A Hutchinson team was calling itself the Salt Packers by 1906, and in July 1917, when the St. Joseph franchise moved to town in midseason, the newcomers became the Hutchinson Wheatshockers, after the shocks of cut wheat that harvest crews stood up in the fields to dry.
Then came the first week of June 1918. The Wheatshockers left for Oklahoma City, and the Topeka club moved into Hutchinson and took the Salt Packers name, on the same day by most accounts. The town traded its bread for its salt and came out ahead: counting their Topeka games, the Hutchinson Salt Packers were 37-31 and in second place when the war's work-or-fight order shut the league down in early July. The Wheatshockers name came back in 1922 and ran through 1933. The salt never left: the mine that opened under Hutchinson in 1923 is still working.
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Something from a can: the Cambridge Canners
Most Thanksgiving tables have at least one dish that came out of a can, and ours comes from Cambridge, Maryland. The Phillips Packing Company started there in 1902 with a single plant and grew into the biggest employer in Dorchester County. One of its plants was called the largest fruit cannery in the United States, and the company put up tomatoes, lima beans, white potatoes and sweet potatoes. During the Second World War it employed about a quarter of the town. The Cambridge Canners played in the Eastern Shore League from its first season in 1922 through 1928, and again in 1940 and 1941. Parksley's sweet potato team was in the same league, so for seven summers the Eastern Shore could put the same vegetable on the table fresh and canned.
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Dessert: the Macon Peaches
Pumpkin pie is the traditional answer, and we have no Pumpkins. We do have peaches. Middle Georgia is the state's peach country, and Fort Valley, southwest of Macon in what is now Peach County, still calls itself the peach capital of the world and at one time had as many as 50 packing houses. Macon's ball club took the name in 1907, when the Brigands were renamed the Peaches, and finished third that first season at 68-54. The club kept coming back to the name for more than half a century, between stretches as the Tigers and later the Dodgers. The Macon Peaches close out the meal.
Where the Thanksgiving turkey comes from
No professional club we have found was ever called the Turkeys. We went through every team in our catalog, searched Baseball-Reference's database for Turkeys and Gobblers (zero hits) and looked across the web. The nearest miss is the 1909 Seattle Turks, who won their league, and a Turk is not a turkey. So the host brings the bird. Our Natchez Pilgrims design is a turkey in a buckled pilgrim hat, throwing a fastball, and with that the table is full.
None of these names started as a joke. The names were the towns' work: the celery fields, the starch plant, the salt wells, the cannery, the orchards. Put them on one table and you get a fair picture of what small-town America grew and packed between the 1890s and the 1960s, and who went out to the ballpark after the shift. That is why we make the shirts. Every design is ours, drawn from what the record shows, and where the record is silent, as it is on the Pilgrims, we say so. If you want a second helping after your baseball Thanksgiving, here are the nine strangest team names we have found.
There are 400 more where these came from.
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