By Stuart Rosebrook
On January 11, 1873, The Arizona Miner newspaper reported one of the first baseball games played in the Arizona Territory, a Christmas day game at Camp Grant: “In the forenoon, an exciting game of base ball [sic] took place. This occupied the attention [of] both of the combatants, until one o’clock, when the welcome call to dinner was wafted to our ears, and readily responded to.” While The Arizona Miner didn’t report the game’s outcome, it reveals that two years after the first professional league, the National Association, was organized in the East, baseball was played in the remote West. Baseball was becoming the national pastime.
Between the founding of the Arizona Territory in 1863 and 1871, soldiers, miners and settlers brought baseball to the fledgling territory. Teams were organized at Army forts, mining camps and boom towns. Prescott appears to have had one of the first town teams. The Arizona Miner reported on June 13, 1866, that “a base ball club has been formed in Prescott.”
As Arizona grew in the 1870s and 1880s, so did baseball clubs, with teams organized in Tucson, Tombstone, Phoenix, Yuma and Prescott. The April 9, 1880 Weekly Journal Miner announced that “a championship game of base ball between a Fort Whipple nine and a picked nine of Prescott” would be played. The national pastime was a part of life in the original territorial capital.
For the next two decades, Arizona baseball was a competitive club sport with community teams from around the territory playing each other in challenge matches. Baseball was a regular part of Fourth of July and Christmas Day celebrations until the 1890s, when amateur football became widespread across the U.S. In Phoenix in 1897, football replaced baseball as the sport played on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
From 1900 to 1912, local semi-pro and amateur baseball clubs operated in most Arizona towns, and town teams competed with inter-city and intra-state rivals. In one instance, baseball squads in Phoenix held a charity game to raise money for San Francisco residents after the 1906 earthquake. On March 30, 1909, the Chicago White Sox played the Commercial Club of Yuma, the first major-league team to play in Arizona.
Six years later, professional minor league baseball debuted in Arizona on April 27, 1915. Baseball promoter and Texas League founder John McCloskey founded the “D” Class Rio Grande Association. The first professional minor league teams in Arizona were the Phoenix Senators, Douglas Miners and Tucson Pimas. New Mexico’s squads were the Albuquerque Dukes and Las Cruces Farmers, while Texas added the El Paso Mackmen.
For the first two weeks, the six-team circuit played competitive baseball, filling the newspapers with Rio Grande scores and stories. Unfortunately, financial difficulties led to the Douglas and Las Cruces teams folding on May 24, 1915, after playing only eighteen and nineteen games respectively.
By the end of June, the Phoenix, El Paso and Albuquerque clubs vied for first place, while Tucson languished distantly in last place. On July 5, 1915, the Rio Grande Association ended the misery and canceled the remainder of the season. If the league had survived tough travel conditions and spectators weren’t confronted with unforgiving desert heat, the freshman circuit may have survived until September 12. Arizona baseball fans would wait thirteen years before another professional league of the National Association was organized in Arizona.
Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D., is the executive director of Sharlot Hall Museum. His love of baseball began at a young age. This article is based on his dissertation “Diamonds in the Desert: Professional Baseball in Arizona and the Desert Southwest, 1915-1958,” (Arizona State University, 1999).
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