In the long view of things, nobody can trust a cannibal.
One of my small time amusements drills from early childhood has evolved around the breakfast table study of team nicknames in Texas high school football and minor league baseball. Do you remember when the Houston newspapers used to publish the scores from all the Friday high school football games on Saturday mornings each fall? You would get to thrill at the news of a score like “Happy 21 – Comfort 6” and then fill in the rest with your imagination. There wasn’t room or sufficient probable interest in the hundreds of game stories involved, but everybody in the Texas newspaper reading market got the scores.
Minor league baseball wasn’t quite as easy to cover or as focused in the local papers. Oh, we got the scores and the standings of all the doings going on in most places in the state, but you really had to read The Sporting News to see the weekly reports from all over the minor league world. There were simply too many leagues across the nation to keep up all the activity beyond our Texas borders in a Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio newspaper.
This morning I ran across an Ebbets Field Flannels ad for a 1926 Longview Cannibals jersey that sent me spinning through the Minor League Baseball Encyclopedia for a reckoning with other off-the-wall or politically incorrect team nicknames from that same season.
Beyond the salad-bowl-dismissive Longview crew, and they were a club that was good enough to eat their way to the Class D East Texas League championship, I came up with nine more nicknames from that single season to complete my favorite mascot list for 1926:
(2) and (3) I had to go with the Wheeling Stogies of the Class C Middle Atlantic League and the Tampa Smokers of the Class D Florida State League. Wheeling finished in the cellar of an 8-team league and Tampa came in 4th in the same sized conferation. Smoking was cool in 1926, but it didn’t win you any championships if there wasn’t a breath of talent on your roster.
(4) The Wilson Bugs sound like a club that was ready to go scampering to their dugout to keep from getting stomped each hot summer night, but these little bat and ball wielding insect-types were not all that bad, slithering and slimming their way to a second place finish in the 1926 Class B Virginia League.
(5) The Springfield Midgets accepted the vertical challenge of a pennant race, fighting their way all they up to the top of the Class C Western Association title in 1926. It would be another quarter century before one of their literal kind would stand up, if not tall, as a batter in a big league game. The player-height discrimination line would be broken, if only for a single time at bat, when midget (or “vertically challenged,” if you prefer) Eddie Gaedel went to bat for the St. Louis Browns on August 19, 1951. Excluding the arguably sized Freddie Patek, no other midget or midget-marginal players have again made it to the big leagues, but their kind did OK at Springfield in 1926.
(6) The New Haven Profs should have been a brainy bunch. They managed to get tenured into 2nd place in the Class A Eastern League, but they weren’t all that smart. They got beat out by the Rubes from Providence for the EL pennant. Somewhere back then, there simply had to be a season-ending headline that read something like “RUBES PICK YALE LOCK ON PENNANT AS PROFS WALK!” Or something like that.
(7) The Palestine Pals cuddled up to Lady Victory often enough to finish 2nd in a six-team Class D Texas Association low priority pennant race – but that’s OK. If it’s your team and town, it’s the World Series.
(8) The Salem Witches didn’t start out as such, but the wizard of poor home attendance robbed the Lowell Highwaymen of the opportunity for playing an entire season. Transformed into the Witches of Salem, the former boys of Lowell found that their magic could not make up for low talent. The pot-boilers finished 6th in the eight-team Class B New England League.
(9) The Wichita Izzies raised more questions than they answered from the cellar of the eight-team, Class B Western Association. What is an “Izzy”, anyway? Based on their 1926 showing, we may only conclude with any certainty that an Izzy is something that other clubs wiped their feet upon on their ways to better fates.
(10) The Durham Bulls are my guys. They only took 3rd place in the seven-club 1926 Class C Piedmont League, but they were the pre-legendary Bulls, for gosh sakes. The Bulls would live on to become the very personification of our most romantic notions about minor league baseball in the old days.
Anyway, that’s it for me and minor league team nicknames from 1926. There are so many ways to slice this pie. And they are all fun, if your heart is into this sort of thing. If it’s not, that’s OK too. You can always go read about oil spills, health care, unrepentant terrorists, LA Laker victory parades, the announcement that Jennifer Lopez is now available as a wedding singer for 2 mil a pop, and the fact that China just passed the USA as the world’s leading manufacturing nation.
Did I ever go into my thoughts on why baseball is important to our American psyche? Oh yeah. I think I just did.
Tags: Baseball, History, minor league baseball
The Pecan Park Eagle 
June 22, 2010 at 2:05 pm |
Good Morning Bill,
I share your fascination with minor league team nicknames and enjoyed the article.
One note on your reference to Freddie Patek who, I’m sure you’re already aware, came from Seguin, Texas. Baseball-Almanac lists Patek as 5′ 5″ and weighing in at 148 lbs. My beloved Washington Senators (The original version.) rostered two players in the late 1950’s who rivaled Patek in the small stature department.
Albie Pearson, who began his career with the 1959 Senators, was also listed at 5′ 5″ and tipping the scales at 141 lbs. Pearson would also play for the Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Angels, in a career that lasted through the 1966 season.
Even a tad more diminuitive was Ernie Oravetz. Oravetz, who was given the deceptive nickname “Moose” is listed at 5′ 4″ and 145 lbs. He played for the Senators in 1955 & 1956.
June 22, 2010 at 7:50 pm |
Bill…what a fun column/article. I’ve always loved to learn
about some of those “off the wall” high school mascots/nicknames.
Now you’ve made me want to look up some of the minor league
ancestors of today’s Sand Gnats.
In the “of no importance what so ever” department, I used to play
against Patek in summer ball around San Antonio. Thirty years ago
yesterday, Freddie hit three home runs in a 20-2 rout of the Red Sox
while he played for the Angels. That gave him four for the season.
He’d averaged three per season for the twelve previous years.
Enough of that. Thanks again for a great column.
Tom
June 22, 2010 at 9:50 pm |
I still like the Lansing Lugnuts. You want the cap?
June 22, 2010 at 9:54 pm |
Ron:
I’ll take that cap in a New York minute!
Bill