The nickname
Commodores refers to
Stephen Decatur, for whom the city is named. The team was often called the
"Commies" for short, from a time before that became a slang term for "
Communist". In their final years, they wore hand-me-down Giants uniforms, although still called the "Commodores", leading some fans to call them the "Commodore Giants".
The
Decatur Commodores were a professional
minor league baseball team based in
Decatur, Illinois that played for 64 seasons. The Commodores are the primary ancestor of today's
Kane County Cougars. They played, with sporadic interruptions, from 1900 to 1974 in a variety of minor leagues, but spent the majority of their existence in the
Illinois–Indiana–Iowa League (the "Three-I" League), later joining the
Mississippi–Ohio Valley League (1952 to 1955) and the
Midwest League (1956 to 1974). While they spent most of their years as an independent without formal
major league baseball team affiliation, their primary affiliations were with the
St. Louis Cardinals and later the
San Francisco Giants, with isolated affiliations with the
Detroit Tigers,
Chicago Cubs and
Philadelphia Phillies.