Did You Know: how the Cubs and White Sox got their names

This is kind of like what ESPN's Sportcenter's "Did You Know". The main differences in mine at times might be longer and it will be about Chicago teams instead of East Coast teams! Sorry, I couldn't resist. By the way, does Sportscenter still do "Did You Know". I can't remember now.

This hopefully will be the first in a series. I hope to do several "Did You Know"s in the future but we'll see I guess.

The first "Did You Know" or "DYK" as I might call is going to be how the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox became the Cubs and Sox. Although it seems that has been their names forever, at one point they both had different names and they eventually got changed to Cubs and Sox. How did that happen? I'm going to tell you. The quotes are from Great Baseball Feats, Facts, & Firsts by David Nemec and Scott Flatow. According to the book, the Cubs were previously called the White Stockings, Colts, Orphans, Broncos, and Cowboys. The White Sox were previously called the Invaders after the American League "invaded" Chicago. The only reason the Cubs were the Colts was because their player-manager Cap Anson was in a play called Runaway Colt. When Anson left, that is when they started being called the Orphans. If they still named teams using that method, the Oakland A's would probably be called the Oakland Poormen because of their very low payroll.

First the Cubs:

"In 1901 Chicago sportwriters George Rice and Fred Hayner began referring to them as the Cubs because their roster was stocked with so many young players after the American League raids had depleted it."

That's kinda odd right? Sportswriters naming teams. Can you see that happening today? Imagine if a Pittsburgh sportswriter wrote, "The Pirates looked like a bunch of turtles out there the way they were reacting to plays." I really doubt the league would officially change the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Pittsburgh Turtles just because some sportswriter called them that.

And now, the White Sox:

The AL Chicago team changed their name to the White Stockings in 1901 "which had been discarded by its National League conterpart (the Cubs) in the late 1880s, but the sobriquet (meaning nickname...why couldn't they write that?) was immediately abbrviated to fit into sports page headlines."

So how about that? The Cubs are the Cubs because MLB really valued the opinions of sportwriters in the early 1900s and the White Sox are the White Sox because White Stockings was too long to fit in sports page headlines.

Interesting....did you know that?