Of Swamp Angels and Mud Hens
One team, two amazing names
I’m a sucker for a good Minor League Baseball team name. The Storm Chasers. The Iron Pigs. The Biscuits. The Yard Goats. And, yes, the Trash Pandas.
Full disclosure: When the Trash Pandas ran their name-the-team contest, I was partial to Moon Possums. I can’t complain about the Trash Pandas choice because they’re both goods but, dang, what could have been.
Doing research and reading for a project, I came across one that really sticks out, not just because it would be the best team name today but because it would later be replaced by a team name that’s one of the all-time greats in baseball.
Depending on what source you believe, organized baseball was played in Toledo, Ohio dating back to at least the Civil War. But if you want to stick with the documented history of professional baseball, that starts in 1883 with the Toledo Blue Stockings.
It’s hard for the modern baseball fan to comprehend such a chaotic history but the first 35 years of baseball in Toledo, starting with that 1883 squad, consisted of 7 teams with 8 team names playing across 7 leagues.
Utter madness. And that’s not counting the 11 parks the team occupied over the same time period.
From 1883 until 1895, the teams, in their various iterations thanks to the volatility of late 19th-century baseball leagues, existed as the Blue Stockings, Toledos, Maumees, Black Pirates and White Stockings.
But at some point in the 1890s, according to the Toledo chapter of SABR, the team was unofficially nicknamed the “Swamp Angels,” “possibly a result of the eternally muddy Toledo springtimes.”
Oh, yeah, also, Northwest Ohio used to be a giant swamp, one so important that, in 1899, the state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan nearly went to war over it. But that’s another story for another time.
So: swampy town, swampy parks, swampy baseball. Hence, Swamp Angels. But team owner Denny Long moved the team to Terre Haute, Indiana in the middle of the 1895 season because the city of Toledo’s blue laws banning baseball on Sunday caused too much of a financial headache.
A fun footnote to the story: the team became the Hottentots upon moving, which, wow.
A new team took up the Swamp Angels moniker and began playing in a different league (the Interstate League) in 1896, playing weekend games at a park outside the city limits to avoid those pesky blue laws.
This is where I want to pause for a moment and focus on the Swamp Angels nickname. Besides the dichotomy of a muddy swamp being paired with a white, immaculate creature, it’s just… a great name? It sounds cool when you say it out loud. If you were 10 years old and you told your friends that was the name of your gang of street toughs, you would feel like an invincible badass.
Logos and merchandising weren’t a thing at the time which is a damn shame because I would build a time machine simply to go back to 1896 and buy all the hats.
Ok, back to the team. The area around the park was populated by coots, a type of water bird that locals nicknamed mud hens (among other things). This led to a new nickname for the team - the Mud Hens - which was adopted in the middle of the season. Again: madness.
What happened next is… a bit unclear. Baseball Reference tells me that after the league folded in 1900, a team fielded in 1901 for the Western League was called the Swamp Angels, a history contradicted by this story from MiLB.com.
That’ll take just a bit more digging on my part to figure out, but that’s the fun of this project. Not helping matters: this official history guide that basically lumps all the teams across Toledo history under one franchise umbrella.
Whatever they were called, the team kept the Mud Hens name until 1916 when a new team was temporarily named the Iron Men before giving that up in 1919 to return back to the Mud Hens name.
The name stuck until the team moved to Wichita, Kansas after the 1955 season. But, when baseball returned to Toledo in 1965, the team went back to the Mud Hens nickname.
This is all a quick and dirty overview, of course. There are a bunch of fun twists and turns in the story and some of this information - as I noted - may be so old, some of it is unreliable and even wrong! Again, this project is gonna keep me digging in archives to sort out what I can, if that’s even possible.
Here’s the thing: even lamenting the brief life of the Swamp Angels name, Mud Hens remains an all-timer. It has the benefit of being kinda weird but incredibly relevant to the local fanbase while also being so old that it’s grandfathered into our culture and not subject to all the hot takes about how team names are getting too silly these days. (Thanks, Jamie Farr!)
It’s an iconic team name for one of the great, long-lasting bastions of baseball. What’s so exciting, too, is there’s so much more to discover here, to learn about the history of Toledo, the Mud Hens and how the two shaped each other.
I can’t wait to share more as the project rolls on.
