The Rocket City Trash Pandas: your new favorite minor league baseball team?

Back in September, Madison, Alabama's impending Minor League Baseball team announced that they would be known as the Rocket City Trash Pandas. While the Trash Pandas are not slated to start playing baseball until 2020 -- with a 7,500-capacity stadium currently being built -- logos for the Rocket City Trash Pandas were unveiled last week.

What is a "trash panda," you ask? A trash panda is a slang term for a raccoon, as popularly used within the film Guardians of the Galaxy 2, which notably starred Sportskeeda favorite Dave Bautista.

And the team's "Rocket City" moniker's meaning, you ask? That part of the tag refers to the nickname of nearby Huntsville, Alabama, which is home to NASA's George C. Marshall Flight Center and Cummings Research Park. In turn, the area is known to be a hub of both the aerospace and defense industries.

The Rocket City Trash Pandas will be part of Southern League, serving as the Double-A affiliate of the MLB's Los Angeles Angels. Said BallCorps managing partner Ralph Nelson about his initial reaction to the name of the team: "I just heard the word 'trash.' I hadn't seen the movies. I didn't know the phrase." Nelson continued: "We put it in the list of 10 [Name the Team finalists], but I still thought, 'We're in the Bible Belt, people won't react to it well.' ... But looking at the stats, any way you slice it -- ZIP code, age group, any demographic you could find -- in every case, Trash Pandas dominated."

The unveiled logos were created by Casey White and Jason Klein of Brandiose. That same firm has also created logos for similarly-controversial baseball teams like the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, El Paso Chihuahuas and Akron RubberDucks. Noted Jason Klein of Brandiose: "All these team names, they represent an underdog mentality."

In the meantime, more on the Rocket City Trash Pandas can be found here, while more on Huntsville, Alabama -- a festival-heavy city that is also home to Yellowhammer Brewing, the Alabama A&M Bulldogs, the Alabama-Huntsville Chargers, Huntsville Speedway and Something To Wrestle With Bruce Prichard co-host Conrad Thompson -- is online here.