Montreal Expos

Before Major League Baseball expanded to Montreal in 1969, there were minor league teams in Montréal and they were usually named the "Royals." This was a reference to Mount Royal (French: Mont Royal), which is located west of today's downtown and after which the city was named.

The Montréal Expos (French: Les Expos de Montréal) were a Canadian professional baseball team there. They were the first Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise located outside the United States.

The Expos were named in honor of Expo 67, which was the World's Fair (exposition) held two years before the Expos began play.

They played in the National League (NL) East Division from 1969 until 2004.  They have no World Series Titles.

In 1994, a players' strike wiped out the last eight weeks of the season and all of the post-season. Montreal was in first place by six games in the National League East Division when play was stopped, but no official titles were awarded in 1994.

Their top franchise players were Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Vladimir Guerrero, Pedro Martinez, Tim Raines, Steve Rogers, Rusty Staub, and Jose Vidro.

Following the 2004 season, the franchise relocated to Washington, D.C., and became the Washington Nationals and the "Expos" name was retired.

Montréal currently has no MLB team.  The Kansas City Royals team name has no connection to the old Montréal teams by that name.

Cleveland Guardians

A fresh look from the 216. pic.twitter.com/0W8VTtZ7b0

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

 Another team has announced that they are changing their team branding - name, logo, mascot - so that it does not offend Native American Indians.

The Cleveland Indians are playing their final season this year under that name and once the season ends they will be known as the Cleveland Guardians.

Why "Guardians?" The "Guardians of Traffic" are 43-foot statues that have stood on the Hope Memorial Bridge for almost 100 years. In a promotional video announcement (narrated by Tom Hanks) you can see the statues and beyond them is the team's Progressive Field. How do they represent Cleveland or baseball? According to the franchise, the Guardians of Traffic symbolize the spirit of progress. "We are excited to usher in the next era of the deep history of baseball in Cleveland," owner Paul Dolan said in a press release.

And why Tom Hanks? Besides him being a beloved actor and voice we trust, he has been a fan of the Cleveland baseball franchise since the late 1970's when he was a young actor interning at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.

 

Oh, and that 216 reference? Check here.

Major League Baseball

One of the many signs of spring is baseball's spring training, even though it wintry in much of the U.S. then. Even opening day games in April are often cold and even snowy. The "Boys of Summer" probably prefer days that are in that just-right Goldilocks zone that is late spring and early autumn.

The pandemic really hurt baseball as well as other sports in 2020 and although the games are on this year, the number of fans is still limited and teams still are still dealing with cases.

Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada.

There are 30 teams in American Major League Baseball (MLB). They are divided up evenly between the American League (AL) and National League (NL) with 15 teams in each. Each of the leagues is divided into three divisions called the East, the Central, and the West.

The NL and AL were formed as separate legal entities in 1876 and 1901, respectively. Beginning in 1903, the two leagues cooperated but remained legally separate entities. In 2000 the leagues merged into a single organization led by the Commissioner of Baseball.

We are working our ways through all the teams' name origin stories. 

MLB also oversees Minor League Baseball, which comprises 256 teams affiliated with the major league clubs. I don't know if we'll get around to all those minor league teams - but some have very interesting name-origin stories.

See all our baseball team name origins 
and all our other sports name origins posts.

National League
East
Atlanta Braves
Miami Marlins
New York Mets
Philadelphia Phillies
Washington Nationals
Central
Chicago Cubs
Cincinnati Reds
Milwaukee Brewers
Pittsburgh Pirates
St. Louis Cardinals
West
Arizona Diamondbacks
Colorado Rockies
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Diego Padres
San Francisco Giants

American League
East
Baltimore Orioles
Boston Red Sox
New York Yankees
Tampa Bay Rays
Toronto Blue Jays
Central
Chicago White Sox
Cleveland Indians
Detroit Tigers
Kansas City Royals
Minnesota Twins
West
Houston Astros
Los Angeles Angels
Oakland Athletics
Seattle Mariners
Texas Rangers

New York Mets

The New York Mets are in the National League East and are based in the New York City borough of Queens.

They were one of baseball's first expansion teams. The Mets were founded in 1962 to replace both of New York's departed NL teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The American League team in New York City is the New York Yankees who are based in the borough of the Bronx. The team's colors combine the Dodgers' blue and the Giants' orange.

The nickname "Mets" was adopted as a shorthand to the club's corporate name, "The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc."

The name also recalls the "Metropolitans" which was a former New York team in the American Association from 1880 to 1887. The shorter form worked better in newspaper headlines.

After the 1957 season, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated from New York to California to become the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. That left the country's largest city in the United States with no National League franchise.

There was a threat that a New York team joining a new third league, so the MLB the National League expanded by adding the New York Mets following a proposal from William Shea.


For the first two years of its existence, the team played its home games at the historic Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan.

In 1964, they moved into newly constructed Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens, where the Mets played until the 2008 season.

In 2009, the club moved into Citi Field, adjacent to the former Shea Stadium site.

Tom_Seaver_at_Shea_Stadium_1974
(Delaywaves CC BY 2.0, Link)

In their inaugural season, the Mets posted a record of 40–120, the worst regular-season record since MLB went to a 162-game schedule. The team never finished better than second-to-last until the "Miracle Mets" beat the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series. The win is considered one of the biggest upsets in World Series history.

In the years since the Mets have played in four World Series. These include a dramatic run in 1973 that ended in a seven-game loss to the Oakland Athletics and a second championship in 1986 over the Boston Red Sox. The "Subway Series" ended in a loss against their cross-town rivals the New York Yankees in 2000. Their last Series appearance resulted in a five-game loss to the Kansas City Royals in 2015.

At the end of the 2019 season, the team's overall win-loss record was 4448–4808, a .481 win percentage.

         

Sports Teams Names

Besides all the jargon of sports, many names of teams have unusual origins, and many terms in sports come from names. Here are some team name origins for hockey, football and baseball.

In the National Hockey League, the Anaheim Mighty Ducks got their name from Disney CEO Michael Eisner who named the team after the hit Disney hockey movie The Mighty Ducks.

When Businessman Charles Adams wanted his new franchise to have brown and yellow team colors to match his stores, and a name equated with strength and power, he ran a contest and the winning fan entry was the Boston Bruins in the early days featuring a bear/bruin.

The Buffalo team management held a contest and chose Sabres as fitting since team officials wanted a name not being used in the pros and something other than a buffalo/bison variation.

When the Flames were located in Atlanta, the name referenced the burning of the city in the Civil War. When the team moved to Calgary, management held a contest and the fans chose to keep the Flames name. The flame could now be considered a reference to Alberta's petroleum industry.

In the National Football League, when George Halas moved his oddly-named Decatur Staleys to Chicago in 1921, the Staleys played at Wrigley Field, the home of baseball’s Cubs. Halas thought that if the baseball tenants were Cubs, then his more rugged gridiron combatants should be known as the Bears.

Paul Brown chose Bengals as the team name for Cincinnati’s 1968 AFL expansion team because there had been earlier football teams in the city called the Bengals. The oldest Bengals were members of an earlier AFL in 1937, then competed as an independent club in 1938, then played in a new AFL from 1939-41 before the AFL merged with the NFL.

The Buffalo Bills nickname refers to William F. Cody, who was known as “Buffalo Bill.” Buffalo had a football team called the Bisons, but the city’s minor league baseball and hockey teams also had the same name. The football team held a contest to select a new nickname following the 1946 season. More than 4,500 entries were submitted and Bills beat out Bullets, Nickels and Blue Devils.

           

In Major League Baseball, one team name example is the 1961 expansion version of the Washington Senators, who were obviously named for the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C.

When they moved to Arlington, Texas in 1972, they took on the totally-Texas nickname Texas Rangers, referencing the famous Texas Ranger Division, the law enforcement agency that was created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823.

The aptly named Colorado Rockies became a new franchise into the MLB in 1993. The nickname "Rockies" is, of course, a reference to the Rocky Mountains which cover much of the western half of Colorado. The name Colorado Rockies had actually already been used by a National Hockey League team from 1976-1982. When that team relocated, they became the New Jersey Devils.

            

Minor league teams had been known as the Miami Marlins for several decades, referencing the marlin, a popular sport fish of the state. There were the Miami Marlins of the International League (1956-1960) and the Miami club of the Florida State League starting in 1963, who was known as the Miami Marlins during 1963-1970 and then again in 1982-1988.

The MLB team began to play as an expansion team in the 1993 season as the Florida Marlins When the major leagues expanded to the Miami area in 1993, the old nickname was revived but called by the state name of Florida Marlins. The Marlins moved into their new ballpark, Marlins Park, in 2012 which coincided with a change in the team colors/uniforms and name to the Miami Marlins.

The Marlins are the only team to win a World Series in their first two winning seasons (1997 and 2003); in fact, they are the only team to even make the playoffs in their first two winning seasons. In those two seasons, they managed to make a surprise run to the World Series, both times as heavy underdogs. They are also the only team to never lose a postseason series.

Check out all our sports names posts.

Boston Red Sox

The name Red Sox was chosen by owner John I. Taylor after the 1907 season. It is a reference to the red socks (hose) in the team's uniform which began in 1908.

There is a tradition of using sox and stockings as part of a team's name. Using "Sox" for a team name had previously been done for the Chicago White Sox, but it was not official at first. Newspapers wanted a shorter, headline-friendly form of Stockings which was part of the official team name.

The team name "Red Sox" had actually been used as early as 1888 by a "colored" or Negro League team from Norfolk, Virginia.

The current Red Sox team is sometimes shortened to "Bosox" or "BoSox", a combination of "Boston" and "Sox" which is similar to the "ChiSox" in Chicago or the minor league "PawSox" of Pawtucket. Sportswriters sometimes refer to the Red Sox as the Crimson Hose and the Olde Towne Team.

Boston was not the first to be a "Red Stockings" team. The Cincinnati Red Stockings were members of the pioneering National Association of Base Ball Players and wore white knickers and red stockings. That team folded after the 1870 season and when a new team was wanted in Boston a few players and the "Red Stockings" nickname were brought there. This was a nickname and not a club names or registered trademark.

The Boston Red Stockings won four championships in the five seasons of the new National Association, the first professional league. In 1876, a new Cincinnati club joined the National League and they took back the "Red Stockings" nickname. The Boston team was referred to as the "Red Caps."

In 1901, the competing American League established a club in Boston that wore dark blue stockings and had no official nickname. They were referred to by fans and newspapers as simply "Boston", "Bostonians," "the Bostons," the "Americans," "Boston Americans" or as the "American Leaguers."

Confusingly, in the 1908 season the AL team shirts featured a red stocking across the front labeled "BOSTON" along with red stockings and white caps, and the NL team also wore red stockings and red caps with an old-English "B."

The Nationals reverted to their red trim and took on the nickname of Braves when James E. Gaffney, became club president in 1912. Gaffney was part of the Tammany Hall political organization which was named after an American Indian chief and used an Indian image as its symbol, hence the "Braves." That nickname has persisted - despite controversy about its stereotyping of Native Americans - and the name followed the team when they moved to Milwaukee in 1953, and then to Atlanta in 1966.

We find the current "RED SOX" appearing in 1912 with the opening of Fenway Park.

The Red Sox compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) East division and have won nine eight World Series championships, most recently this year in their defeat of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Part of the Boston Red Sox story is their long championship drought nicknamed the "Curse of the Bambino" because it was said to have started when the team traded Babe Ruth to the rival New York Yankees. There was an 86-year wait before the team got its sixth World Championship in 2004. The team still has an intense rivalry with the Yankees.

Red Sox fan merchandise

Kansas City Royals

One might suspect that the team name  of the Kansas City Royals comes from the older teams in Montreal that were named after nearby Mount Royal.

The Kansas City Royals baseball team was founded in 1969 and based in Kansas City, Missouri.

The name "Royals" is said to originate from the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and championship barbecue competition held annually in Kansas City since 1899.

There is a kind of royal connection in other teams for the city: the NFL football Chiefs, the former Kansas City Kings of the NBA, the formerly named Kansas City Wizards of MLS, and the former Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League.

The Royals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member team of the American League (AL) Central division. The Royals have participated in four World Series, winning in 1985 and 2015, and losing in 1980 and 2014.

They entered the American League as an expansion franchise in 1969 along with the Seattle Pilots. The city had lost the Athletics (Kansas City's previous major league team that played from 1955 to 1967) when they moved to Oakland, California in 1968.

http://kansascity.royals.mlb.com

Washington DC baseball teams

Current Washington Nationals home jersey

The first professional teams appeared in Washington D.C. (District of Columbia) in 1870. There was a team called the "Olympics" and another called the "Nationals". Other teams were known as the "Nationals" and other names that played off the city being the "Capital City," such as the "Statesmen" and "Senators." Those names have bounced back and forth in and out of D.C. over the years.

By the late 1800s, "Senators" was commonly used in the media as the name for the National League team and that name carried over to the new American League entry in 1901.

When new owners took over in 1905, they solicited fans and writers for a new nickname and they decided to bounce back to using "Nationals" which was what the shirts said in 1905 and 1906.

But their name was somewhat ambiguous and since writers frequently referred to individual major league teams as being  "Americans" or "Nationals" (in reference to their league affiliation), you can find the Washington Nationals of the American League a confusing name and print references to the team as "Senators," "Nationals" (or even the "Nats") interchangeably.

According to Wikipedia, the 1933 programs for the games played in New York City advertised "Giants vs. Senators", while programs for the games played in Washington included a photo of Washington manager Joe Cronin with the caption "Nationals' Manager."

"Nationals" or "Nats" was still used on baseball cards issued by Topps as late as 1956, that name was falling out of fashion. (The popular 1955 Broadway musical Damn Yankees referred to the club as the "Senators.")

The Senators faced the heavily-favored New York Giants in the 1924 World Series and came away with the only World Series triumph for the franchise during their 60-year tenure in Washington.

t-shirt with the old Washington Senators logo via amazon.com

After the 1956 season, owner Calvin Griffith decided to officially change the name to Senators, but it wasn't until 1959 that the word "Senators" finally appeared on their shirts.

Frank Howard, Washington Senators 1970 Topps card via amazon.com 

The Washington Senators was also the name of an NFL American football team that played from 1921 to 1922.

In the confusing world of team expansions and moves from city to city, in 1961, the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota and became the Minnesota Twins.

After the 1971 season, the new Senators moved to Arlington, Texas, and debuted as the Texas Rangers the following spring.

The current Washington Nationals team (now in the National League) was a transplanted team from Montreal in 2005, where they had been known as the Expos. The old Nationals name and "classic" headline abbreviation "Nats" was also revived. Actually, there was no possibility of using the old "Washington Senators" trademark as that is still owned by the Texas Rangers organization.

Baseball's Dodgers

Of all the American baseball team names, the Dodgers may have the oddest nickname.

Today, they are the Los Angeles Dodgers, members of the National League West division of Major League Baseball (MLB), but their origin goes back more than a hundred years to Brooklyn, New York. But those beloved Brooklyn Dodgers went through a series of name changes.

Brooklyn Dodgers logo of 1910-1913

The Dodgers were originally founded in 1883 as the Brooklyn Atlantics, taking the name of a defunct team that had played in Brooklyn before them. The team joined the American Association in 1884 and won the AA championship in 1889 before joining the National League in 1890.

They promptly won the NL Championship their first year in the League.

They were called the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers in 1895. The nickname came from the busy streets surrounding where they sometimes played (they moved a lot) and the dangerous dodging of newly-electrified and faster trolley cars and traffic in general in that New York City borough. That name was still new enough in September 1895 that a newspaper could report that, "'Trolley Dodgers' is the new name which eastern baseball cranks [fans] have given the Brooklyn club."

They had played at a number of parks and were then at Eastern Park, where there weren't any trolley lines, only the elevated railway. The name was soon shortened to Brooklyn Dodgers.

But other team names were used by the franchise that would finally be called "the Dodgers" and the list included some really odd ones: the Grooms, the Bridegrooms, Ward's Wonders, the Superbas and the Robins. These nicknames were used by fans and newspaper sports writers to describe the team, but not officially adopted by the team whose legal name was the Brooklyn Base Ball Club.

In 1932, the word "Dodgers" appeared on team jerseys and the following year it appeared on both home and road jerseys.

In Brooklyn, the Dodgers won the NL pennant twelve times and the World Series in 1955.

The first major-league baseball game to be televised was Brooklyn vs. Cincinnati at Ebbets Field on August 26, 1939. Batting helmets were introduced to Major League Baseball by the Dodgers in 1941.

But Jackie Robinson's story may be the most famous Brooklyn Dodgers story. For most of the first half of the 20th century, no Major League Baseball team employed a black player. I the Negro Leagues, players were denied a chance to prove their skill before a national audience. Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play Major League baseball in the 20th Century when he played his first major league game on April 15, 1947 as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

General Manager Branch Rickey was the key to Robinson's entry and his motivation was both moral (He was a member of the Methodist Church, the antecedent denomination to The United Methodist Church of today, which was a strong advocate for social justice and active later in the Civil Rights Movement.) and a business consideration.

Real estate businessman Walter O'Malley had acquired majority ownership of the Dodgers in 1950 when he bought the shares of team co-owners Branch Rickey and the estate of the late John L. Smith. He had been working to buy new land in Brooklyn for a new, more accessible and better ballpark than Ebbets Field, which was beloved but outdated.

He was offered a site in Flushing Meadows, Queens, but passed as it was planned to include a city-built, city-owned park. The site was the eventual location of Shea Stadium, home of the NY Mets.

O'Malley decided to look outside New York. Los Angeles officials attended the 1956 World Series looking to bring a team home and originally targeted the Washington Senators. (The Senators did eventually move in 1961 to become the Minnesota Twins.)

About the same time, the owner of the baseball NY Giants was also looking for a new ballpark and having a tough time. Their equally antiquated home stadium, the Polo Grounds was unsuitable for updating and, finding no NY real estate, the team moved to San Francisco.

The Brooklyn Dodgers played their final game at Ebbets Field on September 24, 1957, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates. But the Brooklyn version of the team still has fans, as is evidenced by the vintage and reproduction memorabilia still sold today - and especially popular in Brooklyn.

The team moved to Los Angeles and on April 18, 1958, the Los Angeles Dodgers played their first game in L.A., defeating the former New York and newly relocated and renamed San Francisco Giants, 6–5, before 78,672 fans at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. They played for four seasons at the Coliseum before moving to their current home of Dodger Stadium.

Though there were no trolleys to dodge in Los Angeles, there certainly was plenty of freeway traffic.