Atlanta Crackers

Southern Association (1903-1961)
International League (1962-1965)

Background

Major League Baseball touched down in Atlanta in 1966 with arrival of the Braves from Milwaukee. The move marked the end of the city’s tremendously successful and once-popular minor league club, the Atlanta Crackers.

The Crackers played for 63 seasons and were mainstays of the Southern Association from 1903 until the loop’s demise in 1961. The Crackers’ 18 pennants were a league record. When Southern Association disbanded in 1961, the Crackers jumped to the International League and played four more seasons. The team’s last hurrah came in 1962 as a farm club of the St. Louis Cardinals.  The 1962 Crackers won the International League’s Governor’s Cup championship and then bested the Louisville Colonels of the American Association in the Junior World Series.

Racial Segregation

After the Crackers fell on hard times during the Great Depression, the team was propped up financially by the Coca Cola Company, who owned the club outright from 1932 to 1949. Under Coca-Cola’s stewardship, the Crackers played the first racially integrated sporting event in Atlanta, a three-game exhibition series against the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1949. The Dodgers, who were on their way back to New York from spring training in Florida, featured Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. The Crackers and the Dodgers defied a Ku Klux Klan-directed boycott petition and picket of Brooklyn’s hotel to stage the series before huge crowds at Ponce de Leon Park, including thousand of black baseball fans.

Although Coca-Cola continues to tout the Crackers-Dodgers series in their modern day corporate PR, it’s important to note just how poor the Crackers’ overall record on integration was by virtue of their participation in the reactionary Southern Association. The Southern Association remained proudly segregated to its dying day in 1961, long after the integration of Major League Baseball. Nat Peeples appeared two games for the Atlanta Crackers in 1954 (both on the road) and was the only black player even to don a Southern Associaton uniform. Ponce de Leon Park was segregated for Crackers games. (Ponce de Leon also hosted the city’s Negro League team, the Atlanta Black Crackers). After the Southern Association disbanded and the Crackers joined the International League, the team began to add black players, including Hank Aaron’s younger brother Tommie Aaron (Crackers ’65).

Ponce de Leon Park(s)

For most of their existence, the Crackers played in a pair of ballparks known as Ponce de Leon Park. The original Ponce de Leon Park was a wooden structure that opened in 1907 and burned to the ground in 1923. Crackers owner Rell Spiller financed a concrete-and-steel replacement that opened in 1924 and bore his name (Spiller Park) until Coca-Cola took over and re-established the old Ponce de Leon name in 1933.

For many years, Ponce de Leon Park featured a large Magnolia tree in deep center field which was in play. Eventually, long-time Crackers exec and owner Earl Mann moved the fences in, taking the tree out of play. Urban legend has it that Hall of Famers Babe Ruth and Eddie Mathews both blasted home runs into the branches of the Magnolia tree. Ponce de Leon Park was demolished in 1966, but the Magnolia tree still stands behind the loading dock of a Home Depot.

For their final season of play, the Crackers move into the brand new Atlanta Stadium in 1965. The ballpark was built to attract Major League Baseball and by this point the Milwaukee Braves had already declared their intention to move to Atlanta. The Crackers disbanded at the end of the 1965 season.

Trivia

Hall of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell served a batboy for the Crackers as a young boy in the 1920’s. He returned in the early 1940’s as a radio play-by-play man for two spells, interrupted by his war service. In 1948, Crackers owner Earl Mann traded Harwell to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey for catcher Cliff Dapper.

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The Crackers

Early Days of Atlanta Baseball

By Tim Darnell

 

Beginning in an era before traffic jams, air-conditioning, and Atlanta’s ascension to international fame, Tim Darnell chronicles the emergence of amateur and minor-league baseball in various forms in Atlanta from just after the Civil War through the rise of the Crackers (1901–65).

Also profiled is the Black Crackers, Atlanta’s Negro Southern League franchise whose success and popularity paralleled those of their white counterparts.

 

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Atlanta Crackers Video

1939 Atlanta Crackers opening day newsreel.

Links

Southern Association Programs

International League Media Guides

International League Programs

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