Take Me Out

This baseball season has been the most dismal one in the history of the Baltimore Orioles. By any measure, this motley crew that wears the black and orange has come up short, but that does not matter to those of us who love the game.

And loving the game means enjoying watching it, no matter what level. Little league, high school, college, minor leagues, big leagues...they play with varying amounts of expertise, but it's always a great game to watch.

With that in mind, let's tip our hats to the people who run minor league baseball. Time was that in every little town across the USA, there was a minor league team - a "farm" team for the big leagues, where players tried to grow to major league status. Television almost wiped them out, because who was going to sit in the rickety wooden bleachers in Baking Powder, West Virginia and swat at mosquitoes on a sultry July evening anymore, when they could sit at home and watch big time games in comfort?

The farm teams fought back with interesting promotions and giveaways and reasons to come out to the ballpark. Just look at the Aberdeen Ironbirds up the road a bit from here, Cal Ripken's ballclub. They have a great stadium and lots of reasons to come out, and sellouts night after night as they develop tomorrow's stars.

Well, starting in 2020, some of the stars of 2024 and beyond will be able to say that they were once Trash Pandas, as in Rocket City Trash Pandas, the name of the new team set to play in Madison, Alabama.

Madison, Alabama, is a suburb of Huntsville, where NASA built a history of space travel. Hence the "Rocket City" nickname, which actually came about as the result of fan voting down there. There were 28,560 nominations for town and team nicknames, and I guess they have an abundance of raccoons in Huntsville, because "trash panda" is the handle they use for raccoons, those masked critters that knock over your trash can at 3:15 AM, ransacking the detritus for ham bones and half-eaten sandwiches to gnaw on by dawn's early light.




If you were following the voting, Trash Pandas won both rounds of the election, followed by "ThunderSharks," "Moon Possums," "Space Chimps," and "Comet Jockeys."

The team will unveil their logo and official branding on October 27 at a free community celebration, starting at 6 p.m. at Dublin Park in Madison.

I hope this means the above caricature is just the conception of a particularly dyspeptic cartoonist. Pandas are nothing if not cute, even when they're standing in your driveway with half a porkchop in their maws.