What baseball team used to be named after a state?

Answer 1

The Boston Massachusettsians. No, just kidding. In 1957 the Little Rock Travelers renamed themselves the Arkansas Travelers, and claim to be the first sports team to take the name of their state. Naturally they're now affiliated with the Mickey Mouse organization formerly known as the California Angels, who abandoned their state name and are now named after two different cities. The Travelers play in a league named after a state (and not, as some suspect, a bloop single). There were already two baseball teams that had state names: The New York Yankees and the Washington Senators. But the Yankees were presumably named not for the state, but for the city so nice they named it twice. The Senators were named for Washington D.C. and not Washington state -- though there was once a great quote by a Washington Redskins player about how proud he was to represent the great state of Washington. The Senators actually did become the first Major League Baseball team to claim a state name when they became the Minnesota Twins in 1961. The Twins took the state name because they were named after the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the Minneapolis Twins of St. Paul would have sounded almost as ludicrous as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim would sound forty years later.