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The newest ridiculous minor-league baseball team is here and it's the Sod Poodles

mike oz

Minor League Baseball is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for ridiculous ideas. It’s a place for the dreamers of ridiculous dreams to feed us their most ridiculous foods, wear their ridiculous team logos and trot out teams with ridiculous names.

As ridiculous as it is, it’s also quite glorious — that super-serious baseball can devolve into a sport where grown men are playing as Akron RubberDucks or Rocket City Trash Pandas. On Tuesday, MILB got its newest ridiculous team name.

The Amarillo Sod Poodles.

No doubt you have questions and we’ll do our best to answer them, but first let’s look at the logos.

(MILB)
(MILB)

Where did the Amarillo Sod Poodles come from?

The Sod Poodles are the new Double-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres. The franchise was the San Antonio Missions, but is relocating to Amarillo, Texas, for 2019. New city, new name and quite a doggone pipeline:

The franchise did one of those “Name the team” contests and Sod Poodles beat out other ridiculous names such as the Amarillo Boot Scooters, Amarillo Bronc Busters, Amarillo Jerky and Amarillo Long Haulers. Jerky would have been interesting, but the people chose sod poodles, which begs the question …

What the heck is a sod poodle?

This is the most important question, obviously, as there’s a good chance you’ve never even heard the term “Sod Poodle” in your life. A sod poodle is a more Texas-fied name for a prairie dog and the people in Amarillo are apparently all about it.

“We wanted something different, something authentic to Amarillo that’s never been done before,” Tony Ensor, Sod Poodles president and general manager, told MILB.com. “Early on, we looked over a lot of different areas, and we were really focused on the beef industry. … But obviously prairie dogs are prevalent in West Texas, and once we discovered the uniqueness of the Sod Poodle, the minute that name came out, everyone’s eyebrows were raised. There was just something special to it from the very beginning.”

If that’s not enough, just know the Sod Poodles have already inspired not one but two songs about them:

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Mike Oz is a writer at Yahoo Sports. Contact him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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