Los Angeles Looloos

The Los Angeles Looloos, based in Los Angeles, California, played the 1902 season in the California League, the pre-PCL circuit then centered on San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento. The name is a monument to the slang of its day: a "lulu" (the papers spelled it looloo) was something spectacular, a dazzler, a real beauty, the word sportswriters reached for when a play or a game was one for the ages. Calling the team the Looloos was period swagger, plain and simple: Los Angeles announcing its ballclub as the dazzlers of the Coast.

Owned by entrepreneur Jim Morley, the club represented the league's second attempt at a Los Angeles market, following the Los Angeles Angels entry of 1901, at a time when the city was still a fraction the size of San Francisco.

The 1902 Looloos briefly employed one of the wildest talents in baseball history. Rube Waddell, the eccentric left-hander, went 11-8 for Los Angeles before Connie Mack pried him away to the Philadelphia Athletics in mid-season, where he promptly went 24-7 and led the American League in strikeouts. Waddell was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1946.

The Looloos' real legacy is what came next. After the 1902 season, California League officials engineered the expansion that created the Pacific Coast League, and Morley's Los Angeles club joined the new circuit in 1903, where the Looloos name lingered informally for a few seasons before Los Angeles Angels stuck for good. That PCL franchise went on to become one of the most successful in minor league history, but it started here, with one season and one unforgettable name in the old California League.