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Yeah, early days are almost always murky days. My methodology was just using Baseball Reference's team pages. If a team had another team name, it didn't make the cut.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS/index.shtml

Good point on "Americans" simply being newspaper shorthand for "the Boston team of the American League." The oddity is that it's not short. It's longer than "Red Sox," for example. Or "Sox." BR has "Americans" as the team's official name from 1901 to 1907 and a dig into the historical record bears that out. If you search on newspapers.com for "Boston Red Sox" for those years, you get nothing, zero results, until 1907 when you get 13—almost all tied to the announced name change by club president John I. Taylor. How about this for a line? From the Boston Globe, Dec. 19, 1907:

"Pres Taylor has suggested red stocking to be a part of the uniforms and thought the Boston 'Red Sox' might sound better to the baseball enthusiasts than the names now used by many, such as 'The Pilgrims,' 'The Yankees,' etc."

The Boston YANKEES?? Wow. You can revolt two cities at once with that phrase.

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I wasn't suggesting that the team had always been the Red Sox, just that they possibly didn't have an official nickname until Red Sox. At any rate, no team has changed just their name without relocating since the Astros, I would think. And that change needed to be made. There's enough gun shit in this country as it is, we don't need them on ballplayers' jerseys as well.

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Rays --> Devil Rays

Indians --> Guardians

Yankees --> Yankees Suck (or is that still unofficial?)

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