Origin of Minor League Team Names, a Reprise: Q

Back in 2014, I wrote a series of blog posts about the origin of minor league team names. Since then, the minor league landscape has changed a lot. Clubs moved, adopted new names. All reasons to have a new series in which the new names are added and explained. 

This time the letter:

Q:

Unfortunately there is nothing much to tell than the one I did six years ago.

Quad Cities River Bandits:
The Quad City River Bandits are located in Davenport Iowa. The history of organized baseball goes back to the Davenport Brown Stockings in 1879. The Brooklyn Dodgers were the first MLB team to have a minor league affiliate in Davenport. In 1992 the team adopted the name River Bandits, which would last until 2003. On October 20, 2003, the team was renamed the Swing of the Quad Cities; the nickname, like the previous one, was chosen as the winning entry in a “name the team” contest. On December 13, 2007, the team announced it would return to its earlier moniker, becoming the Quad Cities River Bandits. More than 48 percent of voters in a contest sponsored by the franchise’s new owners preferred the River Bandits name over the Swing and four other finalists: the Channel Cats, the Current, the River Eagles, and the Talons.

A little explanation of the name Quad Cities: The Quad Cities is a group of five cities straddling the Mississippi River on the Iowa–Illinois boundary, in the United States. These cities, Davenport and Bettendorf (in Iowa) and Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline (in Illinois), are the center of the Quad Cities Metropolitan Area, which, as of 2011, had a population estimate of 381,342.

     River Bandits main logo

     
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