Providence Clamdiggers
The Providence Clamdiggers were the minor league club of Providence, Rhode Island, on and off from 1891 through 1905, and the name was the one Providence invented for itself rather than inherited from its 1880s National League champions. Every 19th-century Providence team answered to one of two nicknames; the Clamdiggers was the one that belonged to Narragansett Bay.
The first Clamdiggers were a Class A club in the 1891 Eastern Association, and a bad one: 29-54, last in the standings, disbanded on August 13. Pitcher Mike Sullivan led the league in losses at 11-17 while posting a 1.55 earned run average, which tells you most of what you need to know about hitting in 1891. The next year Providence moved to the top minor league circuit in the East, where it would spend most of the next two decades, and Jim Sullivan put up a 0.81 ERA, the best in the league, on a 57-59 team.
Under manager Billy Murray the club became a pennant winner. The 1894 Clamdiggers went 78-34 and finished 16.5 games clear of the field, with Joe Knight taking the batting title at .371, Charley Bassett hitting .368, and Murray himself stealing 68 bases. Murray's 1900 club won again at 84-52, five and a half games ahead of Rochester. A third pennant came in 1905 under player-manager Jack Dunn, who hit .301 with a league-high 157 hits while Jack Cronin won 29 games. Dunn went on to own the Baltimore Orioles, where he signed a teenage pitcher named Babe Ruth in 1914 and sold him to the Boston Red Sox that summer; Boston sent Ruth to Providence for the stretch run, so the 19-year-old finished his first professional season pitching for the same city Dunn had managed to a pennant nine years earlier.
Where the nickname came from is less documented than the pennants. It needs no explanation to anyone who has stood on a Narragansett Bay mudflat at low tide with a rake, but no period account has yet been found saying who first applied it to the ballclub or whether the players ever liked it.
