Richard Worth - Baseball Team Names: A Worldwide Dictionary, 1869-2011

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Worth, Richard, 1947
Baseball team names : a worldwide dictionary, 18692011 / Richard Worth.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-6844-7

1.Baseball teamsUnited StatesNamesDictionaries. 2.Baseball playersUnited StatesTerminology.I.Title.
GV862.3.W67 2013
796.35703dc232012043795

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

2013 Richard Worth. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
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Nicknames, for both people and groups of people, have been in use since human history began. In the ancient world there were team nicknames, as when Roman Circus Maximus charioteers adopted colored banners to impress their cheering fans, becoming the Reds, the Blues, the Yellows, and so forth. Individuals too had nicknames. Among the gladiators in the Roman coliseum were Maximus the Merciful and Demetrius the Destroyer. The heraldic images used by armies and governments of the Middle Ages were the direct ancestors of the sporting team mascots and logos that we have today. Nicknames appeal to us also because we nd them to be fun and entertainingand oftentimes far easier to remember than an athletes or teams actual name. In the 1950s Ted Kluszewski of the Reds, Pirates and White Sox was nicknamed Big Klu almost certainly because most Americans had trouble pronouncing his surname. The same was true of Carl Yastzremski, beloved Boston Red Sox star of the 1960s and 1970s, who was known simply as Yaz.

In baseball, team and player nicknames began to appear almost simultaneously with the rst organized teams in the 1840s, when team names like Knickerbocker and Gotham were in use and Daniel Doc Adams was a star player for the former.

The evolution of team nicknames in baseball has been ongoing for 165 years and had its origin in the names of the social clubs that rst played the game using New York rules in the 1840s. One of the rst such clubs was the Knickerbocker Cluba social organization of upper-class young men in New York City. The Knickerbocker Club was a social club of as many as 200 members who joined for social fraternization, much like the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Lions Club, Young Mens Christian Association and Young Womens Christian Association of today. Young people in these clubs gravitated towards sports and athletics and the inevitable result was the appearance of sports teams like boxing, rowing, archery, track and eld, horse riding, fox hunting, wrestling, ice skating, lacrosse and baseball, not to mention the other ball and stick games, such as cricket, rounders and town ball. Not all of the members of a social club actually joined a sports team. In fact, only a minority of a clubs membership played on a sports team and had the skills to qualify for such competition. Herein lies the crucial difference between a club and a team as dened by 19th-century parameters.

In 1830 the Olympic Club of Philadelphia had a membership of 150 young men and formed a town-ball team to play this ball and stick game. The team consisted of about 30 young men who styled themselves as the Olympic Town Ball Club. Despite using the word club in reference to the social club from which they sprang, the title actually referred to the sporting team they had formed. Starting here with the Olympics, this quandary between club and team would take another 40 years to be resolved with a clear demarcation between social club and sports team. Fifteen years later the Knickerbocker Baseball Club was formed as an offshoot from the Knickerbocker Club social society.

By the 1850s all sorts of social clubs had sprung up in the United States and Canadae.g., the Mutual Club, the Atlantic Club, the Excelsior Club, the Union Club, the Empire Club and so on. But baseball proved to be too popular to be populated merely by the young men of upper-class social clubs. Young men (and young women) of the merchant and labor class also eagerly picked up on the game. In the 1850s the Eckford Club was formed by New York shipbuilder Henry Eckford. He actually had two teams and enlisted his workers at the shipyards, boat builders and dock loaders, to play on them.

The whole original notion of baseball as a genteel, elitist pastime played by carefree upper class young men who cared not whether they won or lost the contest was quickly overthrown by middle and lower class fellows who played the game rough and hard and who played to win. It was this urge to come out on top that not only destroyed baseballs original upper-class status but also paved the way for the professional game that would appear 20 years later in the 1870s.

Baseballs progress was disrupted by the Civil War (186165) but by wars end the higher echelon baseball club (of social club origins) had been entirely replaced by the baseball team. An increasing number of teams had owners and sponsors who were interested in elding winning teams that would attract paying fans. (The rst admission had been charged at Brooklyns Union Grounds in 1862.) The logical and inevitable step to semi-professional and then professional baseball, by 1865, was only ve or six years away.

As such, the social club motivations of early baseball had been largely disavowed, but, baseball teams often retained the old social club name for the teams ofcial title. The Atlantic Baseball Club of 186568 was no longer a social clubplaying now strictly as a baseball teamyet it retained its old social club image in its name.

Not only social clubs but even workplace sponsors were falling by the wayside. The Mutual Club of New York (sponsored by the Mutual Fireghter Association in 1857) and the Eckford Club of Brooklyn (sponsored by the Henry Eckford Shipbuilding Company in 1858) were now concentrating exclusively on baseball full-time and their only connection with their sponsors was the money the sponsors were paying out for equipment, uniforms and travel expenses. Indeed, the Mutual Fireghters, the teams original sponsor for the New York Mutuals, had been effectively replaced by New York City politician William Boss Tweed and his pals who lavishly funded the team. As such, Mutual Club, Eckford Club, Atlantic Club and other such names no longer referred to social or workplace clubs of athletes and non-athletes, but rather, now to money-sponsored and exclusively athletic teams.

With the image of team in the mind of the sporting public, as opposed to club, it was inevitable that team nicknames would soon be used by fans and reporters to spice up the descriptions, references and game reports. The more obvious team nicknames appearing in the period 186888 were those based on stocking colors. In 1868 the Cincinnati Baseball Club innovated the knickerbocker pants-leg to replace the full-length pants worn by stick and ball players for the era 18301867. In the 18th century men often wore these pants that ended at the knee joint combined with long stockings that covered the ankle and calf reaching to the knee. In the 19th century men started wearing trousers that reached the shoe tops because they were more practical and protected the legs better during hard physical labor. In any case, long trousers were not well-suited to such sports as baseball because they restricted the bending of the knee when running and elding. If the pants were too long, owing over the shoe tops, a player could trip and even be injured by the resulting tumble.