Tombstone
Born: 1943
Folded: February 1956
First Game:
Last Game:
Piedmont League Champions: 1944, 1948 & 1949
Stadium
City Stadium
Opened: 1940
Ownership & Affiliation
Owners: Wallace McKenna, et al.
Major League Affiliation: St. Louis Cardinals
Attendance
Lynchburg Cardinals attendance records are incomplete. We are missing Cardinals records from the 1943 & 1944 seasons and Piedmont League figures from 1943 through 1946 seasons.
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Source: The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (3rd ed.), Lloyd Johnson & Miles Wolff, 2007. P -393 483.
Background
The Lynchburg Cardinals were a Virginia-based Class B farm club of the National League’s St. Louis Cardinals for 13 seasons from 1943 until 1955. The Cards won Piedmont League titles in 1944, 1948 and 1949.
Future Hall-of-Famer Red Schoendienst played 9 games for Lynchburg in the spring of 1943 as a 20-year old prospect. Schoendienst went on to be a part of 5 World Series championship teams, winning titles with the St. Louis Cardinals as a player (1946), manager (1967) and executive (1982). He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1989.
Other Lynchburg notables during the Piedmont League era included former Major League All-Stars Wes Ferrell (Cardinals ’46) and Stan Spence (Cardinals ’51) who played brief stints for the club in their late 30’s as their careers wound down. Third baseman Ray Jablonski (Cardinals ’50) went on to earn a National League All-Star nod with St. Louis in 1954.
Television and the national expansion of the Major League began to decimate minor league baseball in the latter part of the 1950’s. The Piedmont League finished the 1955 season with seven ball clubs in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. League President Judge Ben Campbell struggled to hold the league together through the fall and winter of 1955 and 1956. The league finally threw in the towel at the end of February 1956. The Piedmont League’s demise left Lynchburg without baseball that summer for the first time since the 1930’s.
Pro baseball returned to the Hill City for good in 1963 with the formation of the Lynchburg White Sox.
Lynchburg Cardinals Shop
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4 Responses
Are there any historical markers or dedications to the Lynchburg Cardinals?
There isn’t one that I know of but it’s a good idea. May I help?
What’s the current name of the team, and what league do they play in?
Hi Menalcus,
Lynchburg currently has a long-running Class A team in the Carolina League known as the Lynchburg Hillcats. But there is no connection between today’s Hillcats franchise and the Lynchburg Cardinals of yesteryear. That link was broken when the Cardinals left town in 1955. The city later got new franchises in other leagues: Appalachian League (1959), South Atlantic League (1962) and eventually the Carolina League in 1966.