If you’ve seen the Frederick, Maryland-based independent baseball team play in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball this season, you’ve seen a team that’s amid an identity crisis.

That’s by design.

Since first trotting onto the field in April, Frederick’s ALPB team has donned uniforms that feature multi-colored question marks spotted all over as part of a months-long name-the-team competition that will come to an end Friday. 

That’s when the still-unnamed team will don a moniker for the first time in Frederick as part of a pregame ceremony prior to a matchup with the York Revolution at Nymeo Field at Harry Grove Stadium, the club’s home ballpark. 

Those at the club who have helped pull the strings behind the marketing campaign are excited for the city and fans to see the final product. 

They’re also very much looking forward to the end of months of secret keeping from all except roughly a dozen people who know the future name. Not even the players know. They’ll find out shortly before fans do Friday.

“It can’t come soon enough,” Chuck Domino, the Senior Vice President of Baseball Operations for Attain Sports & Entertainment, the team’s owners, said in an interview earlier this month of the upcoming announcement. “I think for all of us, we want to get June 23 behind us and move on. … I’ve almost caught myself three times on this call, revealing what the name is.

“It’s very important to get off on the right foot with the right logo and marketing it and tying it into the community. Telling the right story around the logo, picking the right colors, all that stuff goes into it. So, we’re hoping we strike gold with this selection, as well.”

To understand why Frederick’s ALPB team is going this route in terms of selecting a name, you first must retrace the steps to Kentucky, of all places.

Following the 2022 ALPB season in November, the league’s spot for the Wild Health Genomes (based in Lexington) was purchased by Attain Sports – also owners of the Frederick Keys of the MLB Draft League, among other sports teams in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. areas – for a new team in Frederick. 

The Genomes name didn’t really make sense in Maryland, Domino said, but the process of going through fan name suggestions and finalizing all the logistics (ordering uniforms, going through the trademark process, etc.) meant getting everything ready to go by April’s opener would be impossible.

So, an outside-the-box plan was formed and the idea to go with the question mark-laden uniforms as a placeholder was put into action, while those in the front office got to work on sorting through all the nickname submissions. 

In all, the club received around 1,500 name suggestions, with about 900 to 1,000 of them being unique, which has since been whittled down to five finalists.

2 SLEEPS LEFT❗️❗️

Join us to discover Frederick's best kept secret!
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— FrederickALPB (@FrederickALPB) June 21, 2023

Those five finalists, per the team’s director of marketing Branden McGee, are:

• Bone Shakers, named for the nickname of high-wheel bicycles and a homage to the National Clustered Spires High Wheel Race held annually in Frederick
• Ghost Hounds, in reference to both an urban legend that the ghost of a dog roams the city at night and the fact Frederick is known as a hotspot of “haunted” attractions
• Rail Frogs, named for a switch on a railroad that allows train tracks to change direction, with ties to Frederick’s history as a railroading town
• Sawbones, the nickname of Civil War doctors who amputated limbs on battlefields and a reference to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine located in the city
• Screaming Alpacas, with alpacas shown in the town’s fair and raised domestically in the area since the then-governor of Maryland first imported them in the 1800s, with the “screaming” part in reference to one of the animal’s stress responses

Got all that? 

Get to know them, and study them well, because one of those five options will be the official name of Frederick’s ALPB team later this week, unveiled prior to Friday’s 7 p.m. first pitch.

The game will be streamed live on FloBaseball for those who can’t make it to the field in person.

“It’s going to be a big celebration at the ballpark,” McGee said of Friday’s reveal. “They’re going to go out, warm up in their question mark uniforms (and) it’ll seem like a normal game, and then we’ll kind of switch gears and have about a 15- to 20-minute program of teasing the name, then a grand entrance with some smoke and the team coming out in the uniforms. … It’s going to be a big explosion as they come to the field, per se.”

The uniqueness of all of the possible names, unlike any others you’ll find pretty much anywhere else in professional sports, is the idea and the whole point, the team said. Whichever nickname is chosen will be uniquely Frederick’s and give personal admiration to a certain part of the city’s culture and history that a run-of-the-mill name can’t. 

It’s in line with the branding of the Keys team the ALPB team shared a ballpark with (with that team named for Frederick County native Francis Scott Key, the writer of America’s national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner) and officially will make the club have an identity that was made by those in Frederick, for those in Frederick. 

Those types of ties are what help connections stick in the long run, the team said.

“That was one of the things that was most exciting to me, was when we did get the submissions, you would look at a name like the Sawbones or the Rail Frogs, or whichever one it would be, and you would say, ‘What is this nonsense?’ initially,” team general manager Andrew Klein said of the process. “But then they would give you the reasoning, and just because I didn’t know the whole story about it right away, didn’t mean it doesn’t have that connection to the community.

“It was really cool seeing not just the five finalists, but where all the names kind of came from and how people were able to relate them back to Frederick and our community.”

Around the ballpark, boxes of gear and merchandise sit around with the fresh branding inside, only able to be let loose when the new name is official. Those in the know are careful not to let them slip into unknown hands, tell the wrong person or be accidentally revealed on social media through a poorly arranged photo. 

Check out our cheesin' players 🧀 for #NationalSmileDay pic.twitter.com/4RwGOo9Hj0

— FrederickALPB (@FrederickALPB) May 31, 2023

But when the time does come, and the work put in behind the scenes finally can be shared with the baseball world, the team’s front office will take pride in a job well done – and get to see the community’s creation on display for the whole sport.

This is Frederick’s ALPB team, and there will be no other like it, whichever direction it goes Friday night.

“I’m extremely excited about it,” McGee said. “I’ve been kind of in Bill Belichick mode, so when people ask me stuff in the media, I rattle off the five names (and that’s it). … It’s been a big challenge to kind of market a team without a name. So, I’m excited to have a name and be able to take that branding deep into our community.”