Why is the Cleveland baseball team called the Indians? Controversy generally surrounds the choice of Native American names for sports teams, but not in Cleveland. That city’s baseball team is named in honour of one of their star players from the 1890s. He was Alex Sophalexis, a Penobscot Indian so respected that in 1914, one year after his death, Cleveland took the name “Indians” to commemorate Alex and what he had meant to their team.
Why is the L.A. baseball team called the Dodgers? Before moving to Los Angeles, the Dodgers were based in Brooklyn, New York. The team had originated in the nineteenth century when, because of the dangers of horse-drawn trolleys and carriages, the pedestrians of Brooklyn called themselves “trolley dodgers.” Because most of their working-class fans had to dodge traffic on their walk to the games, the Brooklyn baseball team named themselves the “Dodgers” in their honour. When the team moved to L.A. in the 1950s, they took the name with them.
Why does the letter K signify a strikeout on a baseball scoresheet? Early in baseball history, a man named Henry Chadwick designed the system we still use for keeping score. Because his system already had an overabundance of Ss scattered throughout his scoresheet — safe, slide, shortstop, sacrifice, second base, etc. — he decided to use the last letter of struck, as in, “he struck out,” rather than the first. And that’s why K signifies a strikeout in baseball.
Why do we call someone who is left-handed a “southpaw”? When the first baseball diamonds were laid out there were no night 53
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