History of baseball team nicknames

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This is a summary of the evolution of names of the current professional Major League Baseball teams in the National League (organized 1876) and subsequent rival American League (established 1901), and also of selected former major and minor league teams whose names were influential, long-lasting, or both. The sources of the names included club names, team colors, and city symbols. The names have sometimes been dubbed by the media, other times through conscious advertising marketing by the team, or sometimes a little of both.

Most sources today, including such authoritative references as The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, The Baseball Encyclopedia, Total Baseball, baseballreference.com, the Library of Congress and even the Baseball Hall of Fame itself^[1] usually adhere to an artificial naming convention, dating from 1951, which conforms references to 19th-century teams to modern usage (City + Plural Nickname), and which is misleadingly anachronistic: few teams before 1900 had names, and adopting them only really caught on in the first decades of the 20th century. Team nicknames like the "Boston Beaneaters" and "Brooklyn Bridegrooms" were never official; they were the invention of inventive sportswriters. A few of these coinages actually did catch hold with the contemporary fan base, such as "Robins" and "Browns," and some remained popular long enough to be adopted officially, like "Giants" and "Pirates;" but many of the others were either ephemeral quips, like "Rustlers" and "Ruby Legs," or never existed at all, like "Pilgrims."