By Stuart Rosebrook
On February 10, 2026, 160 years since the first known Arizona baseball team was organized in Prescott, pitchers and catchers will report to their Cactus League clubhouses in the Salt River Valley. Arizona’s Major League Baseball spring training tradition dates from 1929, when the Detroit Tigers were the first MLB team to choose Arizona for their regular season tune-up. The Detroit nine played on a “scratch” diamond of gravel and sand at Phoenix’s Riverside Park, near Central Avenue and the Salt River. The state also hosted the six-team Arizona State League, a D-Class minor circuit.
Two decades earlier, the Chicago White Sox, en-route home from their spring home in San Francisco, stopped in Yuma to play a local team, the first recorded game between a major league squad and an Arizona ball club in territorial history. The White Sox beat the local Yuma’s 11-1 (or 8-1 or 9-1 depending on the source) on March 30, 1909, before a capacity crowd, but since that rowdy day on the Colorado River, Arizona and MLB have cultivated a profitable, fun spring training relationship, benefiting residents and winter visitors.
Nearly a century after that day in Yuma, where 3,000 fans cheered on local players against the Chicago south-siders, baseball still garners publicity for Arizona around the country and world. When the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers begin their spring warm-ups at Camelback Ranch in Glendale, a large contingent of Japanese and Latin American journalists will report on the team’s international stars for their worldwide fans. The Dodgers’ payroll and major league status is in another solar system from the Arizona State League 1929 Globe Bears, who nicknamed themselves “the League of Nations” team for the diversity of their players’ lineages. In 1931 the newly minted Arizona-Texas League added the Internationals, a club from Nogales, Mexico, becoming the first professional, international baseball league in the American Southwest.
After World War II, Arizonans immediately tried recreating the pre-WWII and pre-Depression winter tourism economy. Minor league baseball in Arizona and West Coast spring training had been shuttered since 1941. In 1946 teams returned to California for a post-war season tune-up, including exhibitions in Arizona en route east for the regular season. A year later, the New York Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham was convinced by Cleveland Indians’ owner Bill Veeck to move to Phoenix and Tucson, respectively, for the first season of the Cactus League. The Chicago Cubs made their home in Mesa in 1952, and the Baltimore Orioles picked Scottsdale for training in 1956. For 70 years Arizona has had at least four Cactus League teams.
Minor league professional baseball in Arizona, which boosters brought to the state in 1915, had a less glamorous history than the Cactus League, but continues today as a link to Arizona’s baseball heritage. The Arizona Complex League, a rookie circuit of 15 teams, plays from May to July.
Today, 160 years since Prescott organized a local ball club and 103 years since the White Sox played in Yuma, the state’s baseball boosters’ long-term bet on spring baseball has paid off beyond imagination, with over $710 million grossed statewide and nearly 1.6 million fans attending Cactus League games. Prescott boosters might consider taking a page from the past and promoting a spring exhibition in our city—the first home of Arizona baseball.
Attend Dr. Stuart Rosebrook’s lecture “Diamonds in the Desert…” at Sharlot Hall Museum’s Education Center, February 26 at 2pm. Visit https://sharlothallmuseum.org/event-calendar/ for details.
Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D., the executive director of Sharlot Hall Museum and baseball historian whose research is featured in the traveling exhibit “Baseball Returns,” by the non-profit group Arizona Baseball Legacy and Experience, which was recently featured at Sharlot Hall and will return later this year.
“Days Past” is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are also available at www.archives.sharlothallmuseum.org/articles/days-past-articles/1. The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles and inquiries to dayspast@sharlothallmuseum.org Please contact SHM Research Center reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information or assistance with photo requests.