The Dixie Association

I was thinking about Donald Hays' novel, The Dixie Association and the awesome names for baseball teams he created for the book. My favorite was the Nashville Fugitives, but there were other great ones: Milledgeville Peacocks, Memphis Kings, Oxford Fury, and the Asheville Wolves. It reminded me of when the Nashville Predators hockey team was coming to Tennessee and the newspaper asked fans to write in their ideas for a name. My friend Tony sent in his choice and then proceeded to talk about it for months afterwards, even after the name had been chosen. The Nashville Honky Tonks. A hockey team with the word honky in its title didn't seem like the best choice to expand the fan base, but he was insane about it. I had hoped for the Nashville Nights, with a cosmic black uniform with hundreds of tiny stars covering the jersey. My senior year of high school, I created a basketball league that I acted out with the hoop that hung on my bedroom door. Some other time I'll write about how I managed to play five seasons of games off and on through the years, including drafts and playoffs and retirements, and how I was still doing this while my wife went off to work in the morning and I did not yet have a job. But for now, I just want to talk about the team names. It was fun at first. The Los Angeles Quakes, the Las Vegas Gamblers, the Oakland Bombers, the Houston Mustangs. And that was just the West. After a while, however, it got a little less fun. I was just tossing out names to get it over with. The Denver...Lasers. Fine. The Ohio...Invaders. Whatever. But if I'd had one single team to name, I would have been much more invested. So, I wonder if you had a baseball team coming to the state where you now live and you had to choose the name, what would it be? I hoped perhaps opening up the comments section might lead to some polite conversation instead of the nasty, undignified comments we've been getting (I'm looking at you Hannah...actually I'm looking at a picture of you that Musa D sent me for my birthday, but you get the idea).