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.

Translation and interpretation

Was the forbidden fruit really an apple? 10 Bible surprises

What if some of the Bible stories you grew up with aren't exactly what the Bible says? Was the forbidden fruit really an apple? Were there actually three Wise Men? Did "God helps those who help themselves" really come from the Bible? Over centuries, translations, traditions, and famous works of art have added details that became so familiar, we stopped questioning them. But go back to the texts, and some of these stories look surprisingly different. From Eve's "apple" to the date of Jesus' birth, here are 10 familiar parts of the Bible that may not be quite what we remember.

When you picture the Garden of Eden, what fruit comes to mind? Most people imagine an apple, but there's just one problem: the Bible never says it was an apple.

In the Book of Genesis, the fruit is simply called "the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." The original Hebrew text uses the word peri, which simply means "fruit." The apple connection came centuries later, largely through the Latin translation. The Latin word malum can mean both "apple" and "evil," making it an especially fitting symbol for the story. Over time, that association spread through Christian art and literature. Famous works such as Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 engraving Adam and Eve (also known as The Fall of Man) helped cement the image of Eve holding an apple. Today, it's one of the most famous scenes in history, even though the original biblical text doesn’t identify the fruit as an apple at all.

The story of Jesus' birth is so famous that most of us picture the Three Wise Men, sometimes called the Three Kings, standing beside the manger. But the thing is, over the centuries, the story picked up a few details that aren't actually in the Bible.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the only Gospel that mentions these visitors, they are described simply as Magi from the East. The original Greek word, magoi, referred to learned scholars, astrologers, or priests from Persia or Babylon, not kings. But where did the number three come from? Matthew lists three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but never says how many visitors brought them. Over the centuries, people naturally assumed there must have been three Magi, one for each gift. Even their familiar names, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar, were added later by Christian tradition. So, neither the number of visitors nor their names appears anywhere in the biblical text.

Whether it's used to motivate a friend, encourage a family member, or push yourself to finally make a difficult decision, "God helps those who help themselves" is one of the most familiar religious sayings in America. But here's the surprise: those words never appear in the Bible.

The idea can be traced to ancient Greek sources, including Aesop’s Fables, where the saying appears in an earlier form: "The gods help them that help themselves." The exact modern wording was written by English politician Algernon Sidney in 1698, but it was Benjamin Franklin who helped make it part of American culture when he included it in his 1736 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Many teenagers have heard "Cleanliness is next to godliness" when it was time to clean their rooms. But despite sounding like a Bible verse, the phrase never appears in Scripture.

The Bible, particularly Leviticus, does contain extensive laws requiring people to wash their bodies and clothes in certain circumstances, especially before religious rituals. But the famous saying itself came much later. In 1605, Francis Bacon wrote in The Advancement of Learning that "cleanness of body" was connected to reverence for God. Then, in 1786, it was Methodist leader John Wesley who used the wording we recognize today in a sermon: "Cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness." Over time, the phrase became a familiar saying that many people simply assumed came from the Bible.

When it comes to famous dates, December 25 may be the most recognizable of all, universally associated with Christmas. But here's the surprising part: the Bible never gives any specific date for Jesus' birth.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke describe the Nativity but never provide a calendar date, so how did December 25 become Christmas? There are two leading theories. The first is that the Roman Church was celebrating Christmas on December 25 by 336 AD, during Constantine's reign, possibly choosing the date to coincide with existing Roman winter festivals and make it easier to convert the empire to Christianity. The second points to an early Christian tradition that calculated Jesus' birth date from the supposed date of his crucifixion, eventually arriving at December 25.

The story of Jonah and the Whale is so famous that it has appeared literally or symbolically in innumerable works of art and literature, from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512) to Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick. But there's a small problem with the title we've given it: the Bible doesn’t actually say it was a whale.

In the Old Testament, the original Hebrew text of Jonah 1:17 uses the words dag gadol, meaning "great fish" or "large fish"; it doesn't identify the creature as a whale, or even specify what kind of fish it was. Most modern English translations therefore stick with "great fish," but the familiar "whale" interpretation developed through older translations and later European tradition, eventually becoming so widespread that "Jonah and the Whale" became the name almost everyone recognizes.

Just as we've always pictured the forbidden fruit as an apple, many of us also assume the serpent in the Garden of Eden is the devil himself. But the original story is a little more complicated.

A plain reading of Genesis depicts the creature simply as a serpent or snake, using the Hebrew word nachash. It describes the serpent as clever and crafty, but it never calls it Satan or explicitly identifies it as the devil. So where did the connection come from? The answer comes from later parts of the Bible, particularly the New Testament. In Revelation 12:9 and 20:2, Satan is called "the ancient serpent" (ho ophis ho archaios in Greek), connecting him to the snake of Eden. Over time, Christian tradition applied that later connection back to Genesis, leading to the familiar belief that the serpent was Satan himself.

Many of us remember Samson for his legendary strength and the long hair that was said to be the source of his power. His story with Delilah is one of the Bible's most famous tales of betrayal, but there's one detail some people may have gotten wrong: Delilah didn't actually cut his long hair.

In Judges 16:19, Delilah has Samson's hair shaved while he sleeps on her lap. The text says she called for a man to do the shaving; it never says she did it herself. Yet paintings, films, and other retellings have often shown Delilah wielding the scissors herself, cementing that image in popular culture. It can be considered a small detail, but it’s a great example of how easily familiar Bible stories can pick up elements that aren't actually in the original text.

Many of us think of the Bible as a single book, written at one particular time by one author, or perhaps a handful of them. After all, that's how it looks when you pick one up in a hotel room, but its history is far more complicated.

The Bible is actually a collection of books written by over 40 authors over roughly 1,500 years, from about 1400 BC to AD 100. The exact number of books varies by religious tradition: Protestant Bibles contain 66 books, while Catholic and Orthodox traditions include additional books. Across these different traditions, the writings were produced by kings, prophets, fishermen, and scholars in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. They also span a tremendous range of literary styles, including history, poetry, songs, laws, letters, and prophecy. So while we hold it as one book today, the Bible is actually a collection of many different writings produced across centuries.

Many people assume that at least a few original fragments of the Bible must still exist somewhere. It would be incredible if they did, but none of the original manuscripts, known as autographs, have survived.

The earliest biblical texts were written on fragile materials such as papyrus and animal skins, which could deteriorate through humidity, heat, handling, and simple age. Wars, fires, and other destruction also contributed to their disappearance. So how do we know what the originals said? Through a technique called textual criticism: expert scholars compare thousands of handwritten copies, ancient translations, and quotations from early Christian writers. When they find passages that match across different sources, or differences that reveal how a text changed over time, they can work backward to determine what the original most likely said, even though the original manuscripts themselves are gone.