Baseball Prospectus: Too far from town: Beloit Snappers
From Sarah R. Ingber, Davy Andrews, and SABR member Roger Cormier at Baseball Prospectus on April 16, 2020:
There’s something in Beloit, Wisconsin called the Turtle Mound. People there take it seriously, so don’t confuse it with the Turtle Mound in Florida unless you want a beatdown. The Turtle Mound in Beloit is an ancient burial mound. The Turtle Mound in Florida is an ancient mound of garbage. You can quote me on that. (Or you can look it up. It is, literally, an ancient mound of garbage.)
You know that weird aunt that everyone seems to have? If there’s a thing that can be shaped like an owl, then Aunt Betsy has 42 of that thing? Beloit is what it would look like if Aunt Betsy were a town. There’s Turtle Island and Turtle Creek, and the adjacent town of Turtle. There’s the Little Turtle Playhouse and the Turtle Island Playground, the Twin Turtle quilt shop, and the Turtle Tap Bar. Google Maps seems to be under the misapprehension that there’s also a nightclub called the Goat Hole, but we don’t have to dive into that. In fact, I wouldn’t advise anyone to dive into the Goat Hole.
Beloit’s minor league team started out as the Brewers in 1982, but it was only a matter of time before they switched to something a little more turtletastic. When they did switch, the story goes, there was no money to hire a graphic design company. A relative of someone in the front office did the work in exchange for some merch bearing the anxious, muscly turtle they’d drawn.
Read the full article here: https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/58278/too-far-from-town-beloit-snappers/
Originally published: April 16, 2020. Last Updated: April 16, 2020.