Baseball returns to Grand Junction this summer, with a team whose name honors an endangered native fish – and nods to a winding, yearslong controversy that shocked some and delighted many others.
Long before the Grand Junction Razorback Suckers were spawned, the city was home to the Grand Junction Rockies, then affiliated with Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies.
It wasn’t the flashiest name, not compared to say, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, Portland Pickles or Rocket City Trash Pandas, some of the oddball monikers small baseball teams are known for. So in 2019, a young fan suggested on what was then known as Twitter that the Grand Junction team change its name to something more splashy and local, something that honored a native, threatened fish.
The team’s management famously did not take the suggestion well. In a tweet, they called it “offensive” and went on a blocking spree of anyone who brought it up (including this reporter). After this became national news, the team issued an apology – but stuck to their guns. The “Grand Junction Humpback Chubs” was not happening.
Until it did.
After six years, the idea finally went from pie-in-the-sky to reality on the field, when a new manager announced he actually loved the suggested name. In 2025, the team adopted the aquatic alter ego on a temporary basis for certain home games.
The move whipped up astonished excitement from fans and fish lovers alike – and helped sell more merchandise than ever before, according to the team. But while actual humpback chubs can live 30 or more years, the Grand Junction Humpback Chubs only survived a single season. The team left town after its league constricted last fall.
Grand Junction wasn’t baseball-less for long. This spring, the independent Pecos League announced it would move a team to town. After the office’s original suggestion for a name, the Cliffhangers, went over like a lead balloon with locals, the league asked fans to pick their own favorite. And what rose to the top of the nearly 8,000 online votes? The Humpback Chubs, of course.
But the team’s director, Andrew Dunn, didn’t see it working.
An employee of the former team still owned the Chubs name. Also, it was time to make a “clean break” with that humpback past, Dunn said.
“And so just for us, it just wasn't going to be a thing,” he said.
So Dunn helped look for the team’s own thing. He sifted through a long list of other possible names, including the Midnight Riders and the Uncle Sams (that latter an idea by Pecos league manager Matthew Repplinger).
But none hit quite right for Dunn. Then, he became captivated by another suggestion from that online poll. It paid homage to a different beloved local creature, one that lived on the land, not in the water: the Headless Chickens.
“Man, I love that name. That would've been the best name you ever had, I tell you,” Dunn said, with a laugh.
The name hearkens back to the 1940s, when a rooster survived a beheading by a farmer in the nearby town of Fruita. After a blade left the bird’s brainstem intact, Mike the Headless Chicken went on tour, appearing as a sideshow act until finally dying 18 months later.
Dunn thought calling the team the Headless Chickens would be so fun, so weird and so perfect for a baseball league that’s already home to the Austin Weirdos, the Bakersfield Train Robbers and the Trinidad Triggers.
But like the Chubs, it wasn’t meant to be. Neither Grand Junction nor Fruita city leaders or parks departments were having it, according to the team and a Grand Junction spokesperson
“Grand Junction said: no, no,” Dunn said, with a laugh. “And they don't mean ‘maybe.’ They just said hard ‘NO.’”
He gets it. One city wouldn’t want to steal another city’s headless chicken glory. And as ear-catching as the name would have been, Dunn said: “The Razorback Suckers is going to give it a challenge.”
Originally suggested by a Grand Junction employee, the name hits the right balance of being both local and fun, Dunn said. The new logo features a determined-looking fish gripping a baseball in its mouth, the Colorado flag splashed across the tip of its tail.
Dunn thinks it will be the perfect mascot for a re-envisioned season, with far fewer games than the previous team and each night punctuated with a big promotion, from fireworks nights to Nurse Night to $1 Beer Night. Each game is its own special event, Dunn said.
“When you have 60 games, you’re in no urgency to go to one of these, right? But when there’s 17, different story,” he said.
Ian Lummis, the baseball fan who first came up with the idea for the Humpback Chubs in 2019, said the Razorback Suckers' name is “pretty much perfect.”
While the humpback chub idea brought Lummis a certain amount of fame (he gave interviews to various news outlets and even threw out a ceremonial pitch at a Chubs game), he’s excited that his light-hearted proposal has been adapted – surviving in its own way after the last team went extinct.
“I’m happy that just a year later we got a new team with another fun name and hopefully that will build some good momentum moving forward,” he said.
Lummis thinks wildlife managers should continue to see these games as an opportunity to connect with the public about the importance of threatened, native fish. He remembers fondly last summer how fans were given a chance to meet – and kiss – these fish at a game before they were released into the wild.
While Lummis said he would hope that wildlife officials would not have to rely on “baseball team name-related outreach” to help keep a species alive, he’s pleased that the effort he started years back will continue raising awareness about these deep-water dwellers of the Colorado River Basin.
Plus, Razorback Suckers “is just another local, funny fish name,” he said.
It’s more than he ever could have imagined when he sent that fateful tweet in 2019.
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