Phillies
What’s in a Name?
By Stephen Turk
As the baseball playoffs go on, it’s got me thinking about the names of the team s involved. We have the Boston Red Sox, the Tampa Bay Rays, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers, Red Sox, and Phillies have all been around for a long time, and as such their team names came about in different ways than teams that came about later. The Rays, of course, are one of these later teams, and looking at the stories behind the names, yields some interesting stories, as well as tracks some of the changes that have occurred in sports.
Let’s look at the three old time teams first. When pro baseball started up, there weren’t official team names for many of them. They would be the baseball club from Hyannisport or wherever. Nicknames often came about from sportswriters making an alliteration of the coaches name, relating them to a popular trend, or merely pointing out a common element of their play or uniform detail. › Continue reading