High Point-Thomasville Hi-Toms

Thomasville fielded its first professional team, the Chair Makers, in 1937, a direct nod to the city's furniture-manufacturing economy. After stints as the Tommies and the Thomasville Dodgers, the franchise was renamed in 1948 at the suggestion of longtime player-manager Jimmy Grudzis, who worked with High Point Enterprise sports editor Bill Curry to come up with a name that would represent both High Point and Thomasville. The result, Hi-Toms, stuck.

A year later, in 1949, a seventeen-year-old third baseman named Eddie Mathews arrived at Finch Field and hit .363 with 17 home runs in just 63 games, helping the Hi-Toms win the North Carolina State League championship. Mathews went on to hit 512 career home runs and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978.

The Hi-Toms joined the Carolina League in 1954 as a Cincinnati Reds affiliate. In 1955 they posted the best regular-season record in franchise history, only to lose the league championship to the Danville Leafs in a six-game series, Danville's third Carolina League title. The Hi-Toms switched to a Philadelphia Phillies affiliation in 1957 and 1958 before the franchise folded after that season.

Finch Field itself was built in 1935 by Thomasville Furniture Industries as a recreation ground for its employees, and team scorecards from the Hi-Toms' mid-1950s heyday featured a sly, top-hatted cartoon tomcat swinging a bat over the ballpark, an image this design borrows directly from.