Did you know how the New York Mets got their colors?

It’s right there in the first paragraph of their Wikipedia page, but it wasn’t until I flipped through a cool children’s baseball book that I learned how the New York Mets got their orange and blue colors. The Mets have orange and blue colors to represent the colors of the two National League teams that left New York — blue for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and orange for the New York Giants. Who knew?

That is one of many fun facts you learn about MLB teams in a great children’s baseball book called “Trolley Dodgers, Pinstriped Yankees, and Wearing Red Sox: How MLB Teams Got Their Names.”

The book’s author, Joe Lindenblatt, got funding for the book through Kickstarter. He told me he got the idea for the book when a family member asked him to teach a young child about baseball. He was looking for a good book to help teach the child, but he was unable to find something satisfactory. He decided a book was needed to fill the void, so he combined his love of comic books with baseball to create this book.

It’s actually the perfect baseball book for children.

There is a page on each MLB team, and each team is grouped by league. The information for each team is written in a fun fashion and includes cool facts about the teams, such as the way they were founded and info about their mascot. I thought I was a baseball expert yet I still learned something about nearly every team that I didn’t previously know.

I learned that the Kansas City Royals were named after a royal livestock show, that the Houston Astros were named after the Astrodome, how the Toronto Blue Jays got their nickname, and how the Pittsburgh Pirates were nicknamed based on the way the team did business.

If you have a young child whom you’re looking to teach about MLB, this is a perfect book. You can go here to learn more about it.