Old Baseball Names Carry Hidden Histories

All my life, I believed in a sports legend that never existed. What I thought was the name of a vintage minor league baseball team—The Asbury Park Sea Urchins—was actually a clever ruse crafted by early 20th-century sports editors. The Sea Urchins weren’t real; the true team was the Asbury Park Sea Gulls.

​I know it seems silly, but in New Jersey, we take pride in our quirky traditions and local teams. Honoring old baseball teams—like the Sea Urchins—feels like part of our identity.

​The Sea Urchins spent one season in the 1914 Atlantic League, their name fitting perfectly with today’s trend of creative minor league branding. A team named after a Jersey Shore creature could easily sell merchandise.

​However, the history books and online media databases have all been a lie. The real team name was the Sea Gulls, and they won through a name-the-team contest through the Asbury Park Press. The manager of the ball club, Andy Coakley, created the contest and awarded the winner with two season passes to games at the home ballpark.

​The winner was a gentleman named Mr. William Lyon on June 25, 1914, and was deemed the “best of the bunch”. The other names tossed away in favor of Sea Gulls were Breakers, Serpents, Sand Fleas, Shore Landers, Divers, Travellers, and Beach Babies. (Baseball fans have always been at the cutting edge of naming their baseball clubs with interesting names.)

​Coakley’s team had been playing games in town since May 20, after relocating at the last minute from Bloomfield, NJ, and wouldn’t play their first game at home until July 2. However,  even before the contest-winning announcement, the ball club was referred to as the Sea Urchins. On July 6, a reader sent a letter to the sports editor of the Asbury Park paper. The response was the following.

​“Sea Urchins” is just a name applied by an out-of-town correspondent. Andy Coakley is going to give two season passes to the fan who sends in a nickname, to be judged by three of Asbury Park’s leading citizens.”

​This was in an area where baseball teams went through nicknames like a sick person through Kleenex. Depending on the year, the newspaper, or manager, a ball club could have various names, sometimes multiple ones in the same year. 

Apparently, the Sea Urchins name was created by a crafty writer chomping on a cigar, wearing a pillbox hat, and stamping down on his typewriter in the press box.  The Sea Urchins name would be used in newspapers in Brooklyn, Perth Amboy, and Poughkeepsie. The Sea Gulls name was used in the Asbury Park and Long Branch newspapers.

However, when baseball returned in the spring of 1915, neither the Sea Gulls nor the Sea Urchins returned; in fact, neither did the Atlantic League - it ceased operations. Whatever the team was called, it was soon forgotten. Asbury Park High School and its football stadium were built on the site of  the old athletic grounds, and minor league baseball never returned to the city. Soon, anyone who attended a game that year, which reports said were quite good on weekdays, would be no more.

​Today, there’s a market for these old teams, and one such outlet is Moonshot, a website with an entire section devoted to vintage baseball t-shirts—some authentic, others up for debate. Among them are the Sea Urchins, featuring a sharp faux-back design that mimics the style of classic throwback emblems.

​The list includes the Shenandoah Hungarian Rioters, Sheboygan Chairmakers, Santa Cruz San Crabs, Paris Bourbonites, Hannibal Cannibals, Marquette Undertakers, Cairo Egyptians, and the Muncie Fruit Jars. Many of these team names did exist, but some have been questionable.

​Maybe this was for the best, the Sea Urchins name has a better ring to it than Sea Gulls, which has been used to name other sports teams. The Sea Urchins, to the best of my ability, have never been used and stand out well eleven decades later.

What history tells us of this era of baseball is that not one nickname was alike and could change depending on the local newspapers. Perhaps the Asbury Park Ball Club went by a different name in other cities around the loop, but the name was used several weeks before the official name Sea Gulls was every introduced. Who was the person who first coined the phrase, he has been lost to history. The Sea Urchins name has stood the test of time.

Sorry, Mr. William Lyon.

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Follow all of Marc’s stadium journeys on Twitter @ballparkhunter and his YouTube channel. Email at Marc.Viquez@stadiumjourney.com