How these 8 MLB franchises actually got their names
By Bill Felber
The final category on Jeopardy Friday night was “team names,” and the question pertained to the Chicago Cubs. Two contestants responded correctly to, “an MLB team got this name in 1902 after some of its players defected to a new crosstown rival, leaving young replacements.”
It’s a good Jeopardy question, but hardly the only plausible one for fans of both baseball and Jeopardy.
In fact, it would be easy to fill an entire Jeopardy category (and then some) with questions related to how current teams got the names by which we know them.
So here’s your quiz. What follows is a series of eight questions, each one harder than those previous, related to MLB team names. The question you have to ponder is, “Can you run the category?”
It won’t be as easy as you might think. Granted, there are only 30 teams, meaning just 30 potential answers. But teams have sometimes reached back into their obscure pasts for names. Others are locally obvious, but obscure for those not fans of the hometown club.
In one case, a team didn’t select its nickname but was assigned it by outsiders … for reasons considered nefarious at the time.
Finally, at least one answer requires knowledge of political history to unravel. We’ll save that one for the $2,000 category.
Oh, and don’t get hung up on the dollar values of the questions, which don’t rise neatly as they do in the real game. In real Jeopardy, there are only five questions to a category, but this quiz has eight with values ranging from your generic $100 brain teaser up to a $2,000 masters level challenge. Deal with it.
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