San Francisco Mission Wolves

The San Francisco Mission Wolves played the tail end of the 1914 Pacific Coast League season, and their story is one of baseball's stranger naming accidents. The club began the year as the Sacramento Sacts under manager Harry Wolverton, and San Francisco sportswriters had taken to calling the team "the Wolves" after him. When the Sacts folded on September 6, 1914 and the league moved the club to San Francisco to finish the season, the informal nickname became the team, playing at Recreation Park as the Mission Wolves, the first professional club to represent the city's Mission District.

The stay was brief but the address mattered. A decade later the district got its own team for good when the Mission Bells arrived in 1926, becoming the Mission Reds of Ike Boone and Ox Eckhardt fame, but the Wolves were there first, a team named for its manager playing out the string in a borrowed city.

What happened next is the real story. After the season, Utah businessman Bill "Hardpan" Lane bought the club and moved it to Salt Lake City as the Bees, where Tony Lazzeri would hit a record 60 home runs in 1925. Lane then moved it again to become the Hollywood Stars in 1926, and in 1936 the franchise settled in San Diego as the original Padres, the club where Ted Williams began his professional career. The one-season Mission Wolves sit in the middle of one of the longest franchise journeys in baseball, a wandering line that began in Sacramento in 1903 and finally came to rest in San Diego.