I found myself in a bit of a rabbit hole last Tuesday during the Major League Baseball trade deadline.
Dan McNee and I were discussing the possible big deals yet to come last week when one of us joked that the New York Yankees will “trade away their entire minor league team” to land a current superstar.
To further add to the joke, Dan asked me, “Do the Yankees even have a Triple A team?”
A quick Google search revealed the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders are the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate.
“Solid team name,” I quipped, which led me down this rabbit hole of minor league ball club names.
Each MLB club has at least one affiliate with a ridiculous team name. Baltimore has the Aberdeen IronBirds (High A), the Chicago White Sox have the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers (Single A), Cleveland has the Akron RubberDucks (Double A), Minnesota has the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels (Single A) and Arizona has the Amarillo Sod Poodles (Double-A).
As I said, ridiculous.
However, there are a few that I think are great.
First, there is the Toledo Mud Hens.
The Triple-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers is a team that surely everyone has heard of, and maybe perhaps the most well-known of the minor league ball clubs.
With that said, I’ve never seen a Mud Hens game. My fandom of the Mud Hens name comes from watching reruns of M*A*S*H.
Jamie Farr’s character, the highly entertaining Maxwell Q. Klinger, hails from Toledo, Ohio and talks regularly of wanting to be back home watching a Mud Hens game.
Several notable players have donned the Mud Hens uniform over the years, including seven National Baseball Hall of Famers, Kirby Puckett being one of them. Eight former Mud Hens have managed an MLB club, and 46 have been named an All-Star.
Not too shabby.
Next on my list of excellent minor league ball club names is the Hartford Yard Goats.
The Double-A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies is a relatively new team, founded in 2016 when the New Britain Rock Cats (another solid team name) moved to Hartford.
The Yard Goats got their name following a contest that saw more than 6,000 submissions. Yard Goats was chosen, which I’ve learned is a slang term used for the switch engines or terminal tractors that shuttle train cars between different locomotives.
As someone from a railroad town, I appreciate the cleverness of the name.
The logo is also pretty cool.
Finally, to round out my Top 3 minor league ball club names is… the Rocket City Trash Pandas.
You can’t say it with a straight face, can you?
The Double-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels is based in Madison, Alabama, and is perhaps the newest minor league club, formed in 2020.
I know you’re asking, “Where the heck did the name come from?” Well, loyal reader, Rocket City is a nod to the area’s association with the space industry, namely Huntsville. And Trash Pandas, the slang term for raccoon, is a nod to the determination and ingenuity of the raccoon.
In addition to having a cool name that appeals to kids, they move a ton of merchandise.
I think what I enjoy the most about minor league baseball team names is that they don’t take themselves too seriously. They are creative, appealing to kids, and are often accompanied by outside-the-box marketing and promotions.
One quick look at a few minor league team websites shows promotions for Bring Your Pup to the Park Day (Rocket City), Marvel’s Defenders of the Diamond Night (Buffalo), Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Night and Auction (Albuquerque) and Soap Opera Night (Lehigh Valley).
And the promotions work. My brother-in-law lives near Buffalo, and a few years ago invited us to a Buffalo Bisons game.
With Buffalo being the Triple-A affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays, I was on board with the idea.
“OK, I’ll see if I can get us tickets for Celery’s Last Race,” he said.
The Bisons have a mascot race each home game, featuring the chicken wing (Buffalo and Hot), blue cheese and celery. Celery was retiring at the end of the season, and the team hosted a promotion around the occasion.
“It’s the hottest ticket in town,” my brother-in-law said.
He was able to get the tickets, and he was right – the stadium was full, with more than 15,000 in attendance. The mascot race, usually held at the seventh inning stretch, was moved to after the final out. Nobody left.
Celery had never won a race – 0-449 in its career until that point – but on Aug. 30, 2017, that all changed.
Celery won, erasing the zero from its record to finish with a career record 1-449.
And people still talk about it to this day.
Perhaps we should all take a page from the minor league playbook and relax a little, have some fun, and not be serious all the time.
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Mike Wilson is the editor of the Walkerton Herald-Times. He likes the Rocket City Trash Pandas team name but is not a big fan of raccoons at his home. Let him know your favourite minor league team name at mwilson@midwesternnewspapers.com
