Open during all Trash Pandas games / Toyota Field events. HOURS OF OPERATION: The Junkyard Team Store - Monday-Friday: 10am - 6pm Saturday 11am - 3pm and closed on Sunday. Merchandise for the Rocket City Trash Pandas Official Store is provided in an effort to offer the most extensive selection of officially licensed products on the internet. Six thousand Trash Panda fans can’t be wrong.Welcome to the Official Online Store of the Rocket City Trash Pandas, the Double-A Minor League Baseball Affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels. One way to define success is providing an entertaining evening while sitting outside for hours during a sweltering August evening in Alabama. It would be challenging to argue with Fahrmann. We’re leading the nation among Double-A teams across the country. That’s pretty good considering we’ve had several rainouts and we had a stretch where we had 12 games in 13 days. “We’re averaging 5,800 fans for each game. Today, things are filling in nicely, Fahrmann added. Fahrmann said he wasn’t sure the team would be playing this year. Meanwhile, the organization’s status remained uncertain for 2021. He said those games didn’t make a lot of money but it allowed the team to tread water and more importantly it helped connect the team to the community. Not minor league baseball but Toyota Field hosted travel ball, American Legion, and old men’s leagues. The ideas began rolling off the lips of the employees. So, we asked everyone what could we do?” They began “spit balling” and came up with ideas and strategies to remain relevant. “We had employees from all over the country that moved to the area. We were still working at the park when we were told we were probably the only minor league team in the country that was working from a ballpark.”įahrmann said they sent everyone home. We got a call from the Southern League president in the second week of March, essentially shutting us down. “We had heard about COVID, but we had our head in the sand because we were so busy getting ready for the upcoming season. “We moved into the ballpark in February of 2020,” Fahrmann said. It was then that the Trash Pandas would face an unexpected and unprecedented hurdle – the COVID 19 pandemic. The Trash Pandas in Madison have been assigned to an eight-team organization called the Double-A South, along with Birmingham, Chattanooga, Knoxville (Kodak, TN), Montgomery, Pensacola, Biloxi and Jackson (Pearl, Miss.)

Major League Baseball has been restructured this year and is now calling the shots among minor leagues. Since that time the minor league baseball world has undergone a transformation. In December 2019, Rocket City announced that it had more than $2 million in merchandise sales in just over 13 months since announcing the Trash Panda brand. Others around the nation include the Lansing Lugnuts, Albuquerque Isotopes, Binghamton Rumble Ponies, the Montgomery Biscuits and the Columbia Fireflies. The team was following the minor league baseball trend of unusual names to capture the public’s attention. Solicitations were sought from the region and a winning name was selected – the Rocket City Trash Pandas.

The team rapidly gained attention as the owners sought an identity and a brand. “That research along with the fact that this area is booming led to the decision to relocate to Madison.” They did research on cities that had baseball, lost the team and then came back with a team that was successful,” he said. “The owners began the search for a city to locate a minor league team. The ownership group involves roughly 80 investors, according to Garrett Fahrmann, executive vice president and general manager, who joined the organization in June 2019. The journey of Madison’s flirtation began in 2017 when BallCorps LLC purchased the Mobile Baybears, another Double-A team in the Southern League. Today, Madison boasts a population of more than 50,000. When the Huntsville Stars played its first season in the Southern League, Madison’s population was approximately 10,000. This time it would find a home in the fast-growing suburb of Madison. Minor league baseball would return to the area. The Huntsville Stars had a 29-year run before the energy of the organization faded and the team was relocated to Biloxi, Miss. It had been seven years since the Rocket City had a Double-A baseball team.

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