Uncovering old data

What did the Dodgers actually dodge? 12 pro sports team names explained

Some sports team names sound fierce, others sound mysterious, and a few seem downright confusing. Why are basketball players in Utah called the Jazz? What exactly is a Dodger? And who were the 49ers? As it turns out, many of America's most iconic team names are little time capsules, preserving stories about cities, industries, historical events, and even newspaper jokes. Take a look at these 12 household names. Which one surprised you the most?

The Dodgers weren't always from Los Angeles. The franchise began in Brooklyn, where residents earned the nickname "trolley dodgers" during the late 1800s. Electric streetcars crisscrossed the borough, and pedestrians had to dodge them constantly to avoid serious accidents. Local newspapers started referring to the baseball club as the Dodgers, and the name eventually stuck.

When the team moved west in 1958, it kept the nickname, turning a distinctly Brooklyn expression into one of baseball's most recognizable brands. Few fans realize the name celebrates quick-footed pedestrians rather than baseball players.

The Packers owe their name to a meat-packing company. In 1919, future coach and founder Curly Lambeau secured money for uniforms from the Indian Packing Company, where he worked. Since many of the players were employees there as well, local reporters naturally began calling the team the Packers.

Unlike most professional sports franchises, Green Bay has never changed its nickname. More than a century later, it remains one of the few major American teams still carrying the name of its original corporate sponsor.

Pittsburgh's identity has long been tied to steel, so it was only fitting that its football team embraced the city's signature industry. The franchise entered the NFL in 1933 as the Pirates but adopted the name Steelers in 1940 after owner Art Rooney held a public contest.

The new name honored the thousands of steelworkers whose mills made Pittsburgh one of the world's great industrial cities. Even today, the team's famous logo incorporates the Steelmark, a symbol created for the American steel industry.

The 49ers are named after the fortune seekers who flooded California during the Gold Rush. Gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, but the greatest wave of prospectors arrived the following year, becoming known as the "Forty-Niners."

Although the franchise now represents the San Francisco Bay Area, its name celebrates one of the most transformative events in California history. The Gold Rush attracted hundreds of thousands of newcomers and helped shape the modern American West.

Despite the bear mascot, the Cubs were originally named after young baseball players rather than young bears. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, sportswriters noticed Chicago's roster featured an unusually youthful group of players and began referring to them simply as the Cubs.

The nickname gradually replaced earlier names such as the White Stockings, Colts and Orphans. Today it's difficult to imagine the club as anything else, but its famous name started as little more than a newspaper description.

Milwaukee has been one of America's great brewing capitals for generations, home to legendary breweries such as Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz. Baseball teams in the city had used the nickname Brewers since the late nineteenth century, making it an obvious choice when the current franchise relocated from Seattle in 1970.

Rather than honoring a mascot or an individual, the name celebrates the industry that helped define Milwaukee's economy and identity for well over a century.

Houston's baseball club entered Major League Baseball in 1962 as the Colt .45s. Three years later, the team moved into the futuristic Astrodome just as Houston became the home of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, placing the city at the heart of America's space program.

The franchise adopted the name Astros in 1965 to reflect this new Space Age identity. It remains one of the clearest examples of a professional team embracing a city's role in scientific history.

The Lakers have one of sports' most famous geographical mismatches. The franchise began in Minneapolis, Minnesota, whose nickname, "The Land of 10,000 Lakes", made the Lakers a perfect fit.

When the team relocated to Los Angeles in 1960, it simply kept the name. While Southern California isn't known for lakes, the nickname had already earned a winning reputation and had become too valuable to abandon.

Few team names puzzle fans more than the Utah Jazz. The explanation is simple: the franchise wasn't originally from Utah. It began as the New Orleans Jazz in 1974, borrowing its name from the city that gave birth to jazz music.

After financial difficulties forced the team to move to Salt Lake City in 1979, the nickname remained unchanged. It has since become one of the best-known examples of a sports team carrying a name that reflects its original hometown rather than its current one.

The Rangers weren't named after soldiers or adventurers. Instead, the nickname grew out of a newspaper pun. When boxing promoter Tex Rickard received an NHL franchise in 1926, journalists jokingly referred to the club as "Tex's Rangers," echoing the famous Texas Rangers.

The playful phrase was quickly shortened to simply "Rangers," giving hockey one of its most enduring names, all thanks to a clever headline.

Detroit's famous winged-wheel logo tells the story behind its nickname. When businessman James E. Norris purchased the franchise in 1932, he renamed it the Red Wings after Montreal's Winged Wheelers, an amateur club with which he had once been associated.

The winged wheel also proved especially appropriate for Detroit, already earning worldwide recognition as the center of the American automobile industry. The logo has become one of hockey's most iconic symbols.

The Royals aren't named after kings or queens. Instead, they honor the American Royal, one of the nation's largest livestock, horse, and rodeo exhibitions, held annually in Kansas City since 1899.

When the city received an expansion baseball franchise in 1969, fans voted in a naming contest, and the Royals won in tribute to this beloved local institution. It's a reminder that sometimes a team's name celebrates hometown traditions rather than history's famous rulers.

Jobs nearly gone

These 10 jobs are almost gone. Do you remember them?

When businesses are forced to shut down or completely change the way they operate as technology moves forward, pieces of everyday life are left behind. Not only does this affect old traditions that were attached to those businesses, but also the people who were linked to these industries. There was a time when your milk was delivered by the milkman, or when, to make a call, you had to speak to a telephone operator. Let’s take a trip to the past and see some jobs that had to adapt, and others that simply disappeared over time.

Going to the supermarket or the convenience store when you need dairy products is what most of us do, but life was a little different throughout much of the 20th century, when refrigerators weren’t as common, and grocery stores weren't as big. If you wanted milk, you had to call the milkman.

The milkman was a trusted member of every community, and his job was to deliver fresh milk directly to customers early in the morning several days a week. People would leave their empty bottles at their doorstep, and sometime in the morning, after some familiar glass bottles clinking, the milkman would have replaced them.

Many people would remember the delivery boy on his bike and his canvas bag full of newspapers. If you were a teenager looking to make some extra cash during most of the 20th century, being a part-time newspaper delivery boy was a great choice.

Getting the newspaper at your doorstep used to be essential, so these kids carried a lot of responsibility. The newspaper was, for the vast majority of people, the primary source of reliable information. But the job, as it is traditionally remembered, is almost completely gone due to the rise of the digital era.

In a world where cell phones can do everything from calling your kids and texting to streaming a movie anywhere, thinking about the important role telephone operators played feels so far away in time. Making a call in the late 19th century and most of the 20th century was nothing like today.

Telephone operators were responsible for manually connecting different calls by plugging cables into switchboards in order to help callers reach whoever they were trying to speak to. They were the human link that made the entire system work and enabled communication across cities, states, and countries.

When, in order to watch a movie we didn’t physically own, we had to rent it, video store clerks were necessary. But their job was much more than just ringing you up. They would recommend movies for the family and always keep you up to date about new releases. Sometimes you could even show up and tell them what type of film you liked, and they would give you some advice on what to rent. With the downfall of video rental stores, most of these positions disappeared.

Before E-ZPass and cashless tolling, we would have to fully stop at highway toll plazas, roll down the window, have a little chat with the toll collector, and hand him cash to continue traveling. But besides charging you, toll collectors were very helpful when GPS and the internet weren’t a thing, as they often served as the first point of contact when you needed directions or some sort of assistance.

Once states modernized their highways, these jobs were gradually removed.

Planning your vacations looked very different a few decades ago. Typically, you would meet up with your travel agent, and they would help you with almost every detail of your trip. People didn’t have the internet and websites where they could handle all of this themselves as easily as it is today, so the travel agents booked flights, hotels, cruises, rental cars, everything you can think of.

They were essential for a well-organized trip and helped make things much simpler. You can still find some traditional travel agents, though it is not nearly as common as it used to be.

Operating an elevator now involves simply walking into it and pressing a button. But until the 1950s and part of the 1960s, elevators were a lot more complicated, and you needed specific skills to use them. Part of the common experience of using an elevator was greeting the operator and telling them where you were going, so they could make sure you had a safe ride to your floor. They would often wear smart uniforms and be very courteous with passengers.

How good or bad your experience at the movies was depended a lot on the projectionist. When there were no digital files, the projectionists were the ones responsible for operating the film projectors — but this involved many more tasks than just hitting "play."

Projectionists loaded large reels of film and had to constantly monitor the equipment, swap reels when necessary, make sure the movie was focused, the sound synchronized, and that it played smoothly from beginning to end. After theatres moved away from 35mm film projectors to digital ones, the need for specialized projectionists declined significantly.

Without typesetters, the printing industry couldn’t function. When computers hadn’t yet revolutionized the communications business, typesetters were the ones arranging individual metal letters in order to prepare text for printing: newspapers, magazines, books, advertisements, etc.

Typesetters had to be skilled to know how to organize the entire layout of a page to make it accurate and appealing for readers. And even the smallest typo could mean a lot of extra work to fix it by hand.

The term "human computer" may sound a little odd, but before we had computers as we know them now, companies would hire very smart mathematicians to perform complex calculations by hand — using pencil and paper!

The tasks they carried out were essential to science, playing a crucial role in many of the 20th century’s greatest achievements, like the Space Race. Human computers working for NASA were responsible for calculating everything from rocket trajectories to spacecraft orbits.