Atlanta Pretzels

The Atlanta Pretzels, based in Atlanta, Georgia, went 59-59 in 1902 and finished fourth in the eight-team Southern Association, twenty and a half games behind pennant-winning Nashville. It was Atlanta's first season in the league and the only one the club spent under that name.

The 1902 team turns up in league records under three different nicknames, Pretzels, Firemen, and Crackers, which is a fair measure of how loosely names attached to ballclubs in the era. Pretzels is the one that actually appears in period newspaper coverage of the season, and even there only occasionally.

The franchise itself was imported. Abner Powell and his co-owner E. T. Peter had run the Selma, Alabama club in the Association's inaugural 1901 season and moved it to Atlanta for 1902. Powell is one of the more consequential figures in early Southern baseball, generally credited with inventing the rain check, popularizing Ladies' Day, and being among the first to pull a tarpaulin over the infield during rain. He also talked a young Nashville sportswriter named Grantland Rice into taking a job at the Atlanta Journal that year, which put Rice on the path to becoming the most widely read sportswriter in the country.

Powell owned the Atlanta club through 1905, though he never really won the city over. Locals resented the profits going to an outsider from New Orleans and gradually pushed him out. The team settled on the Crackers name from 1903 forward, moved into Ponce de Leon Park in 1907, and went on to win more championships than any other club in Southern Association history before the league folded after the 1961 season.