Jumbo Shrimp, Shuckers, Blue Wahoos to play Seafood Buffet Series

It’s not by accident that three minor league baseball teams in the Double-A Southern League have seafood-themed team names. The Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp play on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, while the Pensacola Blue Wahoos and Biloxi Shuckers are situated on the cusp of that sports-fishing haven, the Gulf of Mexico. These three teams—with some of baseball’s most edible mascots—will formalize their tasty ties to one another with a round-robin series they’re called the “Seafood Buffet Rivalry.”

The three teams, separated by 477 miles of Interstate 10 (hence the highway sign in the logo), will play a total of 60 games against one another, beginning tonight with the Jumbo Shrimp taking on the Blue Wahoos in Pensacola, the first of a five-game series. When the series wraps up August 1-5 with Jacksonville at Biloxi, the team that has tallied the most wins throughout the season will take home a pound of seafood from the runners-up.

“We thought this was a fun and exciting way to put something on the line and bring some of the franchises with unique nicknames together in our league,” said Jumbo Shrimp general manager Harold Craw, quoted on MiLB.com. “We’re hoping the Jumbo Shrimp can come through in the first year of this rivalry series so that our team in Jacksonville can enjoy some oysters and wahoo at the end of the season.”