The Axmen Cometh

 

Professional baseball came to Kingsport in 1921. That first pro team was called the Kingsport Indians and it was a member of the reborn Appalachian League. (The league had been in business from 1911 till 1914 before folding.)

It hasn’t been a straight line for professional baseball in Kingsport – there have been periods when the city didn’t have a pro team, most notably from 1925-1938 and from 1963 till 1969. For most of the early years the team was known as the Kingsport Cherokees.

But the team had been the Kingsport Mets since 1980, the longest stretch that a Kingsport team has had one name.

That changes this season.

In case you missed the news, Major League Baseball reshuffled, rejiggered, restructured and reduced in size its feeder system, the minor leagues, over the winter. It had nothing to do with the pandemic. I’m not sure exactly why the big leagues wanted to change a system that had been in place for decades. Oh, that’s right, money.

But among all the bathwater that got thrown out was Kingsport’s baby, its professional minor league team, the Kingsport Mets.

The century-old Appalachian League has been diminished into a summer league for college and high school kids. If anything, it’s a pre-minor league.

So the Kingsport Mets are no longer affiliated with the New York Mets and have no connection to the Mets name.

The team also has a new owner, the Boyd family of Knoxville. The most famous of the family is Randy Boyd, the failed gubernatorial candidate who in his spare time happens to be the president of the University of Tennessee.

New owner, new team name: the Kingsport Axmen.

The derivation is something about Daniel Boone and his followers, apparently known as the Axmen, who began cutting the Wilderness Trail on Long Island (well before there was a Kingsport).

You didn’t know that the D.B. in D.B.H.S. should actually stand for Daniel Boone and not Dobyns-Bennett?

Kingsport wasn’t the only local minor league team to get a nickname makeover.

Johnson City, long the Cardinals, is now the Doughboys. (They were the Cardinals as early as 1938; they were also the Phillies and the Yankees.)

There’s also the Greeneville Flyboys and the Bristol State Liners, a pretty weak nickname, but not as pathetic as the Burlington Sock Puppets.

Yes Burlington, the North Carolina city that is 20 miles east of Greensboro. I lived with my uncle in Burlington my senior year in college and it is a haul from Kingsport or any of the other “Appalachian” League teams. And in my four months in Burlington, I never heard anyone make reference to the Appalachian Mountains. Burlington is not an Appalachian Mountain town.

But this is not about whether Burlington belongs in the Appalachian League. Then I’d have to get into how the University of Louisville fits into the Atlantic Coast Conference.

This is about insane baseball nicknames and Burlington has one of the worst. (It derives from the historic Burlington Sock brand.)

The Burlington Sock Poppets? Is that supposed to strike fear in opponents’ hearts?

Odd nicknames have been around baseball for a long time dating back to the Toledo Mud Hens (the name traces to 1896), the Asheville Tourists (since 1897) and the Chattanooga Lookouts (selected in a fan contest in 1909).

It’s only been in the last couple of decades that attention-grabbing nicknames have taken off in the minor leagues. The trend has given us names that seem created to sell hats and tee-shirts instead of tickets.

So we have:

Lansing Lugnuts

Amarillo Sod Poodles

Rocket City Trash Pandas (in Madison, Alabama)

Hartford Yard Goats

Richmond Flying Squirrels

Hickory Crawdads

Savannah Bananas (the nickname has no meaning; just that Savannah and Banana rhyme)

We had the Savannah Sand Gnats before that team moved to Columbia, South Carolina and became the Fireflies.

And now the Kingsport Axmen.

I had never heard of an Axman until I read the story of the new name. And I was born in Kingsport. A long time ago.

I searched the newspaper archive from 1916 to 1965, the year I went away to college, and the name “axmen” appeared exactly twice, once before I could read. The other was in connection with the opening of Cumberland Gap National Park in Kentucky.

So I’ve been trying to come up with a better nickname.

How about the Kingsport Kodels? It’s got that alliteration that sportswriters love. And Kodel was manufactured, when it was manufactured, in Kingsport.

The Kingsport Coovers. That would be a tip of the hat to Harry Coover, the Eastman scientist who invented Super Glue. And it has that alliteration.

Well if you don’t like that, how about the Kingsport Gluemen? Or give it a superhero feel: the Kingsport Super Gluemen.

The Kingsport Press Types?

The Kingsport Villagers, after Borden Mill Village, Cherokee Village and any other Village neighborhoods in Kingsport.

The Kingsport Chemicals? (There is a team called the Albuquerque Isotypes.)

The Long Island Tees?

The Kingsport Jay-Freds?

Okay, I’m just getting silly now.

I only came up with these alternative nicknames as a lead up to the name I really want to see adopted by our minor league team:

The Kingsport Eastmen.