Hickory Crawdads

The Hickory Crawdads are a Minor League Baseball team in Hickory, North Carolina, USA. They are a Class A team in the South Atlantic League, and have been a farm team of the Texas Rangers since 2009. From 1999–2008, they were a Class A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and from their inception in 1993 until 1998 they were a Class A affiliate of the Chicago White Sox. The Crawdads play home games at L.P. Frans Stadium. Opened in 1993, Frans Stadium seats 5,092 fans. The Crawdads won the South Atlantic League Championship in 2002, 2004, and 2015. The team has appeared in the SAL finals three times, and the SAL playoffs ten times.

Notable alumni

Roster

Mascot

Conrad the Crawdad (established in 1993) is the official mascot of the Crawdads. Conrad, along with his partner Candy Crawdad entertain fans of the team.

Hickory

Hickory (from Powhatan) is a type of tree, comprising the genus Carya (Ancient Greek: κάρυον "nut"). The genus includes 17–19 species of deciduous trees with pinnately compound leaves and large nuts. Five or six species are native to China, Indochina, and India (State of Assam), as many as 12 are native to the United States, four are found in Mexico, and two to four are from Canada. Hickory flowers are small, yellow-green catkins produced in spring. They are wind-pollinated and self-incompatible. The fruit is a globose or oval nut, 2–5 cm (0.79–1.97 in) long and 1.5–3 cm (0.59–1.18 in) diameter, enclosed in a four-valved husk, which splits open at maturity. The nut shell is thick and bony in most species, and thin in a few, notably C. illinoinensis; it is divided into two halves, which split apart when the seed germinates.

Beaked hickory (Annamocarya sinensis) is a species formerly classified as Carya sinensis, but now adjudged in the monotypic genus Annamocarya.

Species and classification