TIL there was a Rockies hockey team, but had me wondering;
has a sporting franchise ever abandoned one athletic endeavor for a new one?
Baseball seems like a likely candidate with the on-field number of players between that of football and basketball.
20 comments
Sheffield Wednesday football club in England were originally a cricket team. The Toronto argonauts Canadian football team were originally a rugby club.
I forgot the Devils were briefly the Colorado Rockies (in Hockey) and got so confused. I thought this was saying the team left Kansas City to play baseball in Denver, lol.
The Toronto Argonauts started as a rowing team who would then play rugby to stay in shape and eventually just became a football team.
Not the same Rockies, it’s the nhl team that became the New Jersey devils, all over a decade before mlb expansion for the Rockies. So no reasonable person would think the Rockies now have anything to do with the hockey Rockies from 50 years ago.
The Toronto Maple leafs seem to have changed from Hockey to Golf 😉
The NY Giants were named after the SF Giants (when they were in NY).
The Charlotte Hornets had an early World Football League in the 70s named Charlotte Hornets. Before that there was a minor league baseball team with that name.
The Memphis Grizzlies also had a WFL football team called the Memphis Grizzlies predate them, but that’s a coincidence because the team was the Grizzlies before Memphis.
The Sacramento Kings were renamed the Kings when they moved to Kansas City. Before KC (and Omaha), the team was in Cincinnati and they were the Royals. The Kings were on the verge of leaving Sacramento for Anaheim and if they had, they would have changed the nickname back to the “Royals” due to the NHL Kings in Los Angeles.
The Carolina Panthers probably should have been named the Carolina Cougars since the alliteration flows better but probably weren’t because there was an American Basketball Association team in the 70s called the “Carolina Cougars” and the NBA probably owned the trademarks.
There was a league called the National Football League (not related to the current one) with teams called the Philadelphia Phillies, Philadelphia Athletics, and Pittsburgh Stars. They played one season, in the fall of 1902. The Philadelphia teams were owned by the corresponding baseball teams; the Pittsburgh team may have been owned by the Pirates. A lot of the players were baseball players, including Rube Waddell and Christy Mathewson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_(1902)
Other teams which aren’t in the screen shot but might be in the article:
– St. Louis Browns (now Baltimore Orioles)
– St. Louis Rams (moved from LA and then back to LA)
There have been 4 baseball teams named the Buffalo Bisons prior to this version. Also, 2 football, 2 basketball and 2 hockey teams
Do we consider rugby league a truly separate sport? I have to think it grew out of union clubs.
And I guess rugby union grew out of association football…
(The Rockieses aren’t actually related to each other, fwiw.)
In Brazil you will find several sailing/rowing teams that are currently known as football clubs (although most likely they kept their other sports teams)
Just this year a team got promoted to the nation’s top flight whose name is literally “Rowing Club”
I always found is weird that there were two St. Louis Cardinals teams before the NFL team moved to Phoenix.
That’s a wild concept, but it makes sense when you think about how many clubs started as multi-sport associations. Sheffield Wednesday and the Toronto Argonauts are perfect examples of that early, fluid identity. It’s funny how some teams’ performance can make fans joke about a permanent sport change, too. The history of sports franchises is way less rigid than we often assume.
You should look up the names of teams that joined the NFL in the few decades between WWI and WWII. Like a dozen of them just straight up took the name from the MLB team that already existed in the same city, whose ballpark they often rented to play their games.
Even in the NBA, the Charlotte Hornets and the New Orleans Pelicans were originally the names of minor league baseball teams that played those cities for over 50 years.
The original NFL team in DC was the Washington Glee Club
That would be very weird. I know at least one owner that had to give up his hockey team when he bought an NFL team. That would be Fuck Stan Kroenke.
There was a Colorado Rockies NHL team before there was a Colorado Rockies MLB team.
Obviously , Thats why the Rockies still suck at baseball, GO BACK TO HOCKEY!
Reminds me of the European approach of being a sports club that uses the same name and imagery for all sports, and runs teams from the youth leagues to the pro ranks.
When I lived in St. Louis, I met someone who thought that when the St. Louis Browns left town, they switched sports and became the Cleveland Browns