Lodi Melon Rollers

The Lodi Melon Rollers, based in Lodi, California, were the city's first professional baseball team, playing in the California State League in 1904 and 1905. The name is a small masterpiece of local truth: before Lodi became synonymous with wine grapes, it was one of California's great watermelon shipping centers, sending trainloads of melons out of San Joaquin County every summer, and the image of workers rolling melons up into boxcars gave the ballclub the name the papers used for it from the start.

The Melon Rollers came and went quickly, as most small-market clubs of the outlaw-league era did, and Lodi would wait six decades for professional baseball to return. When it finally did, with the Lodi Crushers of 1966, the new name honored the grape industry that had replaced melons at the heart of the local economy, making Lodi likely the only city in baseball history whose two team names track its agricultural succession.

In the first half of the 1900s, professional baseball reached into towns of every size across America, with leagues rising and folding year to year as cities looked for entertainment in the era before television, and few names anywhere said more about their town in two words than the Melon Rollers.