Avalanche of names buries Bangor baseball office

BANGOR – Saturday marks the final deadline in Greater Bangor Baseball Inc.’s Name-the-Team contest, and the team’s Bangor office is still digging out from the avalanche of ideas.

“We’ve had more than 600 entries so far,” team president and general manager Dean Gyorgy said Friday afternoon. “I didn’t really know what to expect, but we’ve been getting 150-200 entries a day from Portland to Fort Kent.”

While the frontrunners for the independent minor league team which will play in the New York-based Northeast Baseball League won’t be narrowed down by Gyorgy and his staff until Sunday afternoon, the most popular nominations include nicknames invoking life in Maine.

“We’ve had a lot of Bunyans, a lot of Black Flies, a lot of Timber Kings, Timber Barons, and Lumberjacks,” Gyorgy said. “There’s a lot of imagination out there.”

The winner will be announced sometime after Feb. 1 in the Bangor Daily News.

The league schedule is still in the works, even after the league’s owners met Thursday in Newburgh, N.Y., to iron out the 1996 season.

“We have one, we hashed it over, and we had too many complaints about the schedule,” NBL president Jeffrey Kunion said, adding a final schedule should be ready next week.

“I’ll be working on that this weekend,” Kunion continued. “I guess part of it was that certain owners, coming in a little later [in the scheduling process] were saying they wanted to play at home on this date or that date.”

Part of the holdup prior to the meeting was the confirmation of new homes for the Sullivan Mountain Lions and the former Newburgh Night Hawks.

The Night Hawks had attempted to move to Cooperstown, N.Y., and play at historic Doubleday Field, but that plan was shot down by the Cooperstown City Council back in the fall.

Elmira, N.Y., became the next eligible candidate, but the New York-Penn League’s Pioneers, a Class A team now affiliated with the Boston Red Sox, had to get permission to move to Lowell, Mass., before the Night Hawks could move in.

The Sullivan Mountain Lions, owned by Jay Acton, have also been sold and will play this season in West Warwick, R.I., although Kunion said none of the Sullivan management would be making the move.

The team drew an average of 1,200 fans to each game, giving it a third-place league attendance ranking.

The former Mohawk Valley Landsharks’ player personnel director, Mike Palermo, bought the team and moved it to West Warwick, where he owns a summer home, Kunion said.

“Geographically, it makes a lot of sense for us because it’s a midway stop,” Gyorgy said of the West Warwick site.

The league owners also decided to postpone further expansion to eight teams until the 1997 season, Gyorgy said.