Baseball, to my way of thinking, used to have the best nicknames in all of sports.
Some of them are fairly well-known, like George Herman Ruth being known as ‘Babe’ or Jerome Hanna Dean being known as ‘Dizzy’. We don’t seem to have nicknames like that anymore.
I think part of it is because a player making $10 million a year would prefer not to be known as ‘Babe’ or ‘Dizzy’. I base this theory on the number of decent nicknames still around in the 1970s and 1980s, like Brooks Robinson being ‘The Human Vacuum Cleaner’ or Ozzie Smith being ‘The Wizard of Oz’.
Where you can still find some great baseball nicknames is in the teams themselves. It’s been that easy for a while, of course. The now Los Angeles Dodgers came from Brooklyn, bringing the nickname with them.
In Brooklyn, it apparently came from the fans getting to the ballpark having to cross trolley tracks to get there, and becoming known as ‘Dodgers”.
Something I like to do every couple of years is go through the minor-league teams in baseball and check out their nicknames. Some of them simply use the same nickname as their parent team, so you have the Iowa Cubs, the AAA farm team of the Chicago Cubs.
One team that found it couldn’t do that was the Houston Astros a few years ago. They were moving one of their farm teams to a city in Florida called Kissimmee. The team had been known as the Astros at their previous home, but someone in the Astros organizations decided calling the team the Kissimmee Astros was not a good idea. They thus became the Kissimmee Cobras. Unfortunately, the Cobras were gone from Kissimmee after the 2000 season.
There are some other great nicknames still around, though. A quick look through a Minor League registry for this season revealed the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Aberdeen Iron Birds, the Amarillo Sod Poodles, the El Paso Chihuahuas, the Rocket City Trash Pandas, and the Sugar Land Space Cowboys. You should look up a couple of these teams online just to see their logos. Some of them are pretty wild.
Best known minor league nickname, at least for people of a certain age – the Toledo Mud Hens. They were the favourite baseball team of Cpl. Maxwell Klinger from the TV show MASH.
Three guesses where actor Jamie Farr, who played Klinger, was born.
One thought on “Trash Pandas, Sod Poodles, and Space Cowboys … baseball has them all”
Great article