The humpback chub is a silvery green fish with a Quasimodo hump only found in a few deep-water spots in the Colorado River — and in the ballpark in downtown Grand Junction. The small desert city’s minor league baseball recently adopted the threatened species as its alter ego team name.
Most of the time, the team is called the Grand Junction Jackalopes, but on home games on Wednesdays, it transforms into the Humpback Chubs.
Shortstop Isaac Nuñez thinks the name change is going swimmingly.
“Everyone was super excited about it. They were excited to put the jersey on, and we were excited to call ourselves a Chub. So everyone loves it,” he said, with a big smile.
But things weren’t always so chummy between the team and fish supporters.
The saga started in 2019 when a 22-year-old Grand Junction native named Ian Lummis fired off a tongue-and-cheek tweet, espousing an idea he’d held dear for years. He wanted his hometown baseball team to change its name.
Back then, the team was known as the Grand Junction Rockies to show its then-affiliation with the Colorado Rockies. To Lummis, this seemed like a lost opportunity to do something fun, unique and local, in the spirit of other minor league teams, like the Birmingham Rumble Poneys and Albuquerque Isotopes.
Why not the Grand Junction Humpback Chubs?
It landed him in immediate hot water with the team.
“If they’d just said ‘no comment,’ nothing would have happened,” Lummis said.
Instead, team management fired back with their own tweet, calling the word “chub” an “offensive slang term.”
“I was absolutely thrilled to have caused an organization like that to have a public meltdown,” Lummis said.
He said the team blocked him and others who suggested or even just mentioned the Humpback Chubs on social media. Lummis became a momentary Internet celebrity. The more he talked to the media, the more people he inspired to sign his petition asking the team to change the name. He got about 5,000 signatures.
Lummis kept pushing the name change and eventually even scored a conversation with Charlie Monfort, the owner of the Colorado Rockies. It went “great” and raised his hopes, Lummis said.
Those were dampened in 2022, when the team was sold off and given a new, conspicuously non-fishy name: the Jackalopes, mythical bunnies with antlers.
However, when Harrison Shapiro took over last year as team president, “my very first order of business I knew was: we were going to do the Humpback Chubs.”
He’d always liked the name, though he made sure the new jerseys were designed carefully to avoid future controversy.
“We didn’t put any baseball bats in our Chubs logo for obvious reasons,” he said, with a chuckle.
Instead of adopting it permanently, the team transforms into the Chubs during Wednesday home games, as well as a few special other days. Having an alter ego has become a folksy move a lot of minor league teams have made lately, from the Wisconsin Udder Tuggers to the Eugene Exploding Whales.
To Shapiro, the Humpback Chubs are what minor league baseball is all about.
“It's about fun, it's about wackiness and it's about connecting with the local community,” he said.
It’s also about reeling in more business. The team has sold more Humpback Chub merchandise in the last few months than they have Jackalope merch in the last two years.
At the Chubs’ inaugural game, fans tried to keep cool with pints of the new Chubs-themed beer from a local brewery as mascot Jake the Jackalope hyped up the crowd in his new Chubs jersey, featuring the fish front and center.
Like many fans, Melissa Trammel wore her green Chubs hat and shirt — and even a small humpback chub necklace she’d forged herself. A retired fishery biologist with the National Park Service, she's a fan of both the baseball Chubs and the fish chubs, which can grow to about 2.5 pounds and live up to 40 years in the most turbulent spots on the Colorado River.
“Threatened and endangered and native species are worth cherishing and saving and celebrating,” she said, “So to see the community come together like this, to celebrate the humpback chub, is just really endearing and hopeful to me.”
Just like every Chubs game, employees with Colorado Parks and Wildlife set up an info table, giving out free fish magnets and pamphlets to the crowd. The team also works with high schoolers to raise threatened fish at a nearby fish hatchery to restock local rivers. At the end of the season, Chubs' jerseys will be auctioned off to support the program.
Fan George Hanink, who used to be a season ticket holder for the Grand Junction Rockies, thinks the new name brings awareness — and is also simply fun.
“It’s just a real good thing,” he said. “I think they should permanently go to the Chubs!”
It’s pretty much the best outcome Ian Lummis could have imagined when he sent that tweet six years ago. What could make it even better? Throwing out the first pitch at a Chubs game.
And of course he did.
As he stepped up to the mound on a recent sweltering afternoon, the announcer called him “the godfather of the Humpback Chubs” right before his pitch sailed perfectly into the catcher’s glove.
“I’m not just happy for me,” he said. “I’m very happy for the team and the city. I really hope it can turn into something really good that can benefit everybody.”
Seeing the crowd displaying their Humpback Chub apparel, it seemed this whole Chubs thing already had.
