Miami Marlins
Posted by Andy on July 16, 2011
This flew under my radar--apparently the Marlins plan to rename themselves the Miami Marlins when they move to a new downtown stadium next year.
(Sorry to anybody who has been missing my content for the last couple of weeks...been very busy on the personal side!)
July 16th, 2011 at 9:37 pm
I think they'd be happy to call themselves anything if they can finally get some fans to the ballpark.
July 16th, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Miami Marlins, eh? Cool -- maybe they'll put up statues of Satchel and Pancho.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=paige-001ler
http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=herrer001jua
July 16th, 2011 at 10:01 pm
Believe it was part of the deal to get the funding.
July 16th, 2011 at 10:04 pm
@ 3: That is correct. I'm curious as to how the logo is going to change. Like, will they keep the font? Change colors? It seems that a new stadium and a new-ish name will give them a chance to re-invent themselves.
July 16th, 2011 at 10:16 pm
I vote Miami Heaters
July 16th, 2011 at 10:30 pm
Come to think of it, they do feel like a mid-fifties International League team...
July 16th, 2011 at 10:30 pm
As John pointed out in @2. "Miami Marlins" is their old minor league name (or one of them). Its like when the Angels changed their name back to LA.
July 16th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
Beats the old I-A League handle - Miami Amigos
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Miami_Amigos
July 16th, 2011 at 10:41 pm
This is the opposite as the Florida/Miami situation, but more MLB citys should embrace their old MILB nicknames:
Phoenix Firebirds
Minneapolis Millers/Saint Paul Saints
Kansas City Blues
Hollywood Stars (two teams in LA, Angels and Stars)
Oakland Oaks
San Francisco Seals
Houston Buffaloes
Seattle Rainiers
Denver Bears
Atlanta Crackers
Toronto Maple Leafs
Tampa Tarpons (or Tampa Smokers)
July 16th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
If memory serves, the Miami Marlins was an independent team for a while, wasn't it? So you'd often see ex-big-league players on the team, waiting for their next shot.
July 16th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
there were several incarnations of the Miami Marlims I saw them as a kid in 1970.
Even though the stadium was the same one the O;s used im March, it was basically a decrepit park in a bad neighborhood. if memory serves me after all these years attendance was somewhere south of 1,000 oer gane,
The following year, they changed the name to the Orioles as was the custom back then
July 16th, 2011 at 11:50 pm
@9 Still is a team called the St. Paul Saints.
July 16th, 2011 at 11:56 pm
Kinda doubt the "Atlanta Crackers" is making a comeback.
July 16th, 2011 at 11:59 pm
I use to live in Miami and I think the Marlins should pick a name more reflective of the culture in Miami, like the Miami Home Invaders, or the Miami Drive-by-shooters, or the Miami Transvestite Prostitutes.
July 17th, 2011 at 12:09 am
Hey Andy-
Hope all is going well on the personal front. Best of luck!
July 17th, 2011 at 12:13 am
So let me get this straight ..... with the Marlins name change there will be only four ML teams still named after states, not counting the Angels.
@9
David RF, I remember the old Maple Leafs. Blue accents on their uniforms. Now let me go search for the logo on the Internet.
Speaking of minor league baseball logos, what does a Rainier or a (Fire?) Cracker look like?
July 17th, 2011 at 12:31 am
@16
Mount Rainier is visible from Seattle. Although the Rainier Brewing company owned the team, although that company is named after the mountain.
I don't know the history of the Crackers. The Negro League team was the Black Crackers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Crackers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Black_Crackers
I agree those names aren't making comebacks but that was the name of the team so it made the list. Padres, Angels, Brewers, Rangers (and Marlins) kept their minor league names. Well, Dallas had other names, but Rangers was one of them.
July 17th, 2011 at 12:51 am
@10, Dan -- The Miami Marlins of the mid-'50s (for whom Satchel Paige played) were almost entirely ex-big-leaguers. The team was also run by Bill Veeck at some point there ... but he never did bring in Eddie Gaedel.
July 17th, 2011 at 12:55 am
@17
DavidRF, thanks for the link to the Atlanta Crackers. The speculations on the origins of the name in the Wiki article are interesting. Also an impressive list of alumni.
Their logo doesn't provide much of a clue. It looks like their colors were red and black, but the logo was just the word Crackers written in red script across the front with the last letter "s" being extended backwards like an underline. The cap had only a white "A".
http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/store/Products/79474-bates-buddy.aspx
And the Atlanta Crackers were International League opponents of the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1962-1965.
July 17th, 2011 at 1:21 am
Anyone have an idea which team name has had the most incarnations? For instance, I think there's been about 5 distinct incarnations of Baltimore Orioles. Can any top that?
July 17th, 2011 at 1:33 am
@20 Nationals or Senators maybe?
July 17th, 2011 at 1:51 am
I knew that, but I didn't know the ballpark was already under construction.
I was expecting at least 10 more years of reading in THT:BOB about the struggle to start construction.
July 17th, 2011 at 2:24 am
@20
Johnny, by incarnations you meant minor league franchises that had the same nick name as a current ML team?
July 17th, 2011 at 2:38 am
Yes. Well, minor or major.
For example, there was the great NL team of the 1890s known as the Baltimore Orioles. Then there was the AL team which moved to New York and became the Yankees. Then there was the minor league team which gave Babe Ruth his professional debut. Of course there is the current AL team. That's four teams which are unrelated except by location and nickname.
(There's also the Orioles of the 1880s AA. They only played a partial season in 1890. I don't know the history well enough to be sure if the team that rejoined the AA for a full season in 1891 and then joined the NL in 1892 should be considered the same franchise, or a new incarnation of the same name.)
July 17th, 2011 at 9:22 am
@24
The AA Orioles folded after 1889 and joined the Atlantic Association for 1890. But late in the 1890 season, the new-AA team in Brooklyn, the Gladiators, folded so Baltimore rejoined the AA for the end of the season.
July 17th, 2011 at 9:49 am
"So let me get this straight ..... with the Marlins name change there will be only four ML teams still named after states, not counting the Angels."
Texas Rangers
Minnesota Twins
Arizona Diamondbacks
Colorado Rockies
I assume we are not counting the New York teams? Technically, if they were named after their non-state locations they'd be the New York City Yankees/Mets or the Bronx Yankees and Queens Mets.
July 17th, 2011 at 9:55 am
@24
Got your meaning, now. Your question inspired a lot of scrolling through screens of minor league franchise histories on BBRef without reaching an answer.
I don't know of any way to search the minor league franchise histories in BBRef by keyword, which would make the answer to your question @20 easy to find.
After a bit of unscientific eyeballing, the word Sox, although not a complete nick name, is perhaps the most common overall in baseball history. There have been a surprising number of Indians also.
But man there are some strange minor league franchise nicks out there and they tell an interesting story of American history, settlement, development and industry.
How about the 1905-7 Temple Boll Weevils of the Texas League or 1920-32 Wichita Falls Spudders of the same league. In their last year of existence, the Spudders were also known as the Longview Cannibals. There has to be an interesting story there!
Batavia Muckdogs anyone? (NY-Penn league, 1998 to present)
July 17th, 2011 at 10:03 am
@26
Yes, that was my thinking, BSK. I've always thought it was presumptious of a franchise to name itself after a whole state rather than its city, history notwithstanding. For example, the Texas Rangers compared to the Houston Astros.
Why wasn't Colarado called the Denver Rockies?
And, taken to an extreme, the Bronx Yankees or Queens Mets are more in keeping with the old Brooklyn Dodgers way of naming.
July 17th, 2011 at 10:17 am
The Marlins could do like the Angels did in 1965. They changed their name in the last month of the season, while still playing in Dodger Stadium. They moved to Anaheim the following year.
July 17th, 2011 at 10:35 am
Neil-
I always assume that comes down to marketing. If you are the Colorado Rockies, you can sell yourself as belonging to the whole state, but if you are the Denver Rockies, you may limit yourself to only the greater Denver area. I don't know how much of that really matters, but I presume that would be the explanation offered.
July 17th, 2011 at 11:40 am
@28
"New York" is the name of the city. Brooklyn was an independent city when the Dodgers were founded (and the old pre-Dodger franchises in the NA and NABBP). Brooklyn became a borough of New York in 1898.
So, the Bronx/Queens analogies don't hold. It wasn't the Manhattan Giants.
July 17th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
The Texas and Minnesota names make some sense, because they are in metro areas with more than 1 dominant city and play(or in the twins case playED) in suburbs that were not at all well-known outside the immediate metro area.
And I guess in that context "Florida" makes sense too, as they weren;t in Miami. they were closer to downtown Ft. Lauder-dale than Downtown Miami when they began play.
I don't understand why Arizona and Colorado needed to differentiate themselves from Phoenix and Denver though.
the one that bothers me, is "Tampa Bay". Technically speaking they aren't anyone's hometown team except for the few who live on house boats. But then Tampa always has had an identify problem. they are home to the University of SOUTH Florida which is actually closer to Valdosta, GA than it is to Miami!
July 17th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Should be called the Fort Lauderdale Marlins Of Miami, so the NL would now have one big silly name including two cities separated by a 45 minute driving distance.
July 17th, 2011 at 4:00 pm
@10...yes, Miami was an independent (non-affiliated) team in the FSL for a while. Because of that status, they were granted the right to participate in the June draft in 1990. (It yielded Mike Lansing, who was later sold to the Montreal Expos.) Does anyone know the whole story about their brief participation in the draft?
July 17th, 2011 at 5:47 pm
@31: But it is interesting that the NY Giants and NY Highlanders/Yankees were so named when they played in Manhattan, which is and was analogous to New York County.
July 17th, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Imagine if the Miami Marlins move to the American League as part of a possible upcoming realignment. In reality we could have the Miami-Cubs World Series in 2015 that occurred in Back to the Future 2! (sorry, someone had to say it)
July 17th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Great notion, Jeff -- but I think you're pushing cinematic science fiction beyond all believable bounds.
I predict a Miami Marlins AL pennant precedes a Cubs NL flag by at least 5 years. If the baseball gods were ready to lift the Billy Goat Curse, they would have done so in the Aughts, when they absolved both Sox squads of their original sins.
On the other hand, by 2015, the Cubs will at last be out from under the Soriano and Zambrano contracts, so who knows....
July 17th, 2011 at 9:12 pm
@ 20
The Philadelphia A's had at least three. Two in the 1800s (the first folded after 1876 and a different one started in the 1880s I believe) and then the current one in 1901.
@36 That would be very weird. Oddly the most unbelievable part about that would be the Cubs being good again in 4 years. They're a mess.
July 17th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
the NY Giants and NY Highlanders/Yankees were so named when they played in Manhattan, which is and was analogous to New York County.
Have any teams been named after counties? I assume some minor league teams have.
HOWEVER, there is a small section of the Bronx (a bit east of Riverdale, I believe) which is technically considered part of New York County. The Harlem River used to run to its north, but at some point the river was diverted to its current location to its south, and the former riverbed was filled in, so this little nub of Manhattan became part of the Bronx. This came up a few years back when someone from that location tried bringing a lawsuit in Bronx County (which tends to be favorable to plaintiffs). It was ruled that that section of the Bronx was actually New York County. Too lazy to look up the details.
July 17th, 2011 at 11:33 pm
When I was 8 going on 9, the 1st "modern era" Wasington Senators moved to the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. That was in 1961. I wondered why they were called the Minnesota Twins instead of the Minneapolis Twins or the St. Paul Twins or, most logically, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Twins. I then decided that they didn't just play their games in the Twin Cities but instead played all over the state of Minnesota. I may have gotten this impression when the 2nd "modern era" Senators went to Minnesota to plya the Twins and saw that the dateline in the Washington Star newspaper that my parents subscribed to read Bloomington, Minnesota. So, I decided, that particular series was being played in the small town of Bloomington. Maybe other teams played the Twins in places such as Duluth or Rochester (not to be confused with the New York State community where the Twins currently have their AAA club).
Eventually, I discovered that Bloomington is a suburb of the Twin Cities, a place where they would play in two different venues through the 2009 season.
My misconception of the Twins traveling around the Gopher State wasn't so farfetched, however, because the Carolina Cougars of the American Basketball Association in the 1970s did that very thing. They played in a few different cities in North Carolina. According to their Wikipedia entry, this was because they didn't think any one N.C. city had enough of a population at the time to support a team. (Perhaps this is why the first Charlotte NBA franchise, which began play in the late 1980s, did not succeed.)
If you consider the teams with New York in their name to be references to New York City, the Twins set the major league baseball precedent for teams named for states. None of the four most recent franchises bears the name of a single city, although of course Miami will starting next year. (Actually, the most recently-named baseball franchises, both of which took effect in 2005, are the Washington Nationals and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (a renaming in the latter case).)
Among various places in the country that have been susceptible to state names for teams and which have a major league baseball team:
Phoenix - NBA and NHL use Phoenix, NFL and MLB use Arizona
Denver - NBA and NFL use Denver, MLB uses Colorado, NHL currently uses Colorado but had an earlier team that used Denver (and if I recall correctly, they were called the Rockies)
Miami - NBA and NFL use Miami, NHL uses Florida, MLB currently uses Florida but will be using Miami starting next year
Dallas-Fort Worth - NFL, NBA, and NHL use Dallas, MLB uses Texas
Minneapolis-St. Paul - NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL (both for the Wild and the old North Stars) use Minnesota, but when the Lakers played there, the NBA used Minneapolis
Anaheim in the early 1990s - NFL used Los Angeles (Rams), NHL used Anaheim (Mighty Ducks), MLB used California
Non-MLB locales:
Northern New Jersey - NBA and NHL use New Jersey, NFL uses New York for two teams
North Carolina - NHL uses Carolina for a team in Raleigh, NFL uses Carolina for a team in Charlotte, NBA has used Charlotte for both teams based there since the 1980s
Indianapolis - NBA uses Indiana, NFL uses Indianapolis
July 17th, 2011 at 11:41 pm
And if you can bear some more:
Tampa/St. Petersburg - NFL, MLB, and NHL all use Tampa Bay
Boston - NBA, MLB, and NHL all use Boston, NFL uses New England, although the Patriots and earlier teams (including the Redskins) used Boston in the past
Anaheim today - NHL uses Anaheim, MLB uses Los Angeles with an Anaheim footnote
Oakland - NFL and MLB use Oakland, NBA uses Golden State, 1970s NHL franchise used California at the same time the Angels, a few hundred miles away, were also using California (and both the NBA Golden State and MLB Oakland used to be based in Philadelphia)
July 17th, 2011 at 11:48 pm
both the NBA Golden State and MLB Oakland used to be based in Philadelphia
Very true, I never made that connection.
July 18th, 2011 at 1:17 am
@39, Johnny Twisto -- You're referring to Marble Hill, which is physically in the Bronx, but legally in Manhattan.
I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn when I first moved to this neck of the woods ... then Williamsburg ... then Sunnyside, Queens ... then Inwood ... then Riverdale. I guess I was destined to wind up with a house in Westchester.
BTW, I know of one minor-league baseball team named for its county -- the Kane County (IL) Cougars of the Class A Midwest League:
http://www.kccougars.com/
I don't understand why they are listed on the B-R minor league "Teams" page under "Geneva" -- I guess that's the town they're in, but geez, wouldn't you rather have the ACTUAL NAME of the team listed?
July 18th, 2011 at 1:22 am
@40, DoubleDiamond re: Carolina Cougars of the ABA --
The Virginia Squires also spread their home schedule over multiple venues, including Hampton Roads Coliseum. That's where I had the privilege, as a 4th grader, of watching a young Dr. J building his legend in the wide-open ABA.
It's too bad Bill Veeck wasn't into basketball; he would have been a perfect fit for that crazy league!
Thanks for digging up that memory!
July 18th, 2011 at 9:18 am
Miami Marlins is OK. As long as they don't do something convoluted that makes no sense, like The Florida Marlins of Miami. Wait...
(sorry, it will always be "California Angels" to me)
July 18th, 2011 at 9:30 am
@ 44 The Brevard County Manatees are based in Melbourne, FL
The Kissimmee Cobras were formerly knows as the Osceola Astros. The team didn;t move. it is just that Kissimmee is in Osceola County, and the ballpark was Osceola County Stadium.
I guess they wanted to avoid calling themselves the Kissimmee Astros.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:45 am
"@39, Johnny Twisto -- You're referring to Marble Hill, which is physically in the Bronx, but legally in Manhattan."
I transfer trains in Marble Hill a lot. It is one of my favorite little trivia facts of NYC. Residents there have to go down to Manhattan city hall to deal with a lot of issues, all the way at the southern tip of the island. Sucks for them.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:53 am
DD, one small correction to your #40 above:
NHL currently uses Colorado but had an earlier team that used Denver (and if I recall correctly, they were called the Rockies)
The NHL team based in Denver from 1976 to 1982 was called the Colorado Rockies.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:58 am
@31, @35, #39, et al
Brooklyn was the name of the city, but it was never been the name of the county. The county has always been Kings County. Since the British took over New Amsterdam, The City has always been called New York City--it was never called Manhattan. The island is called Manhattan. The county on the island of Manhattan has always been called New York County. However, it is highly doubtful that either the New York Giants or the New York Highlanders/Yankees named themselves after the county. All of the baseball team names were and are city names.
July 18th, 2011 at 11:12 am
@49
Please don't suggest the Mets change their name to the Queens Mets. They have enough problems as it is!
July 18th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
@ 49
Besides, if they named the team after Manhattan, people would always be wondering whether they meant Manhattan, NY or Manhattan, Kansas
July 18th, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Even though my mother was originally from Rochester, NY, and I still have relatives there, because of the trend of major league teams putting their AAA affiliates near by, I keep thinking that the Twins' Rochester farm club is in the same city as the Mayo Clinic, not the same city as Eastman Kodak.
The boundaries of the city and county of Philadelphia coincide, but you never hear about Philadelphia County except in their role in running elections. I believe that the city and county of San Francisco also coincide, but I don't know what type of a role the county government plays there. Los Angeles County is a lot larger than the city of L.A. In fact, the minor league city of Lancaster, CA, is in L.A. County but is about 70 miles away from Dodger Stadium. And of course, the "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" play in "the O.C.".
Yet, whenever I hear about the Lancaster JetHawks, my mind tries to locate them in Lancaster, PA, county seat of Lancaster County, PA, which is about 70 miles west of Philadelphia. And to add to the confusion, I have driven past a minor league ballpark in Lancaster, PA, which turns out to be the home of an independent league team.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Since Queens addresses are actually divided by neighborhood, perhaps they'd instead be known as the Flushing Mets.
Make your own punchline.
July 19th, 2011 at 11:31 am
And... HOW didn't Andy catch this months ago?