Houston-area Triple-A team swats Skeeters name, launches Space Cowboys

SUGAR LAND, Texas (WISH) — Houston, we have a new name for the Sugar Land Skeeters.

The Houston Astros’ Triple-A West baseball club will start its second season in the league with a name change: Sugar Land Space Cowboys. That announcement came Saturday afternoon at the Constellation Field, in the Houston suburb about 20 miles from the Astros’ Minute Maid Park and 40 miles from NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

The team logo will change from a mosquito with a baseball on its stinger to what the team described on its website as “a sleek, futuristic astronaut with a constellation reflected in his visor,” “a stylized cowboy hat” atop a helmet, and a bandana around the spaceman’s neck.

The new mascot, a blue, puffball-looking animal with alien antennae, is named Orion.

The Sugar Land franchise was established as the Skeeters in the independent Atlantic League in 2012, playing in that circuit through 2019, says a minor league baseball reporter in a story posted on the Space Cowboys website.

The Indianapolis Indians, which in summer 2020 began weighing a name change of their own, are the Triple-A East league affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

By the way, the MiLB story made no mention of “Space Cowboys.” The 2000 adventure movie, directed by Clint Eastwood, starred him, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner as older “ex-test pilots” sent into space to repair an old Soviet satellite.