Baton Rouge Red Sticks

The Baton Rouge Red Sticks, based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, played in the Evangeline League from 1946 through 1955. The team's name is a translation of the city's own: Baton Rouge is French for "red stick," named by early French explorers for a tall red-painted cypress pole they found on the Mississippi riverbank, used by local tribes as a boundary marker between hunting grounds.

The Red Sticks won the 1950 Evangeline League championship, scoring a league-high 895 runs during the regular season and sweeping the Hammond Berries four games to none in the playoff finals. They reached the finals again in 1951, losing to Hammond in six games. Baton Rouge infielder John Radulovich led the league in batting that year at .409, the first player in Evangeline League history to eclipse .400, adding 41 doubles and 31 home runs.

After the 1955 season, the Baton Rouge franchise renamed itself the Rebels for its final two years before folding mid-season in June 1957.

The Evangeline League was a Class D minor league (Class C from 1949) that operated primarily in southern and central Louisiana from 1934 through 1957, with a wartime pause from 1943 through 1945. Named for the Acadian folk heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 epic poem, the league was nicknamed the "Pepper Sauce League" or the "Tabasco Circuit" by fans and sportswriters, a nod to the Cajun country setting and the volatile brand of baseball played there.