Tombstone
Born: 1982 – The West Haven A’s relocate to Albany, NY
Affiliation Change: September 1984 (Albany-Colonie Yankees)
First Game: April 18, 1983 (L 10-3 @ Glens Falls White Sox)
Last Game: September 4, 1984 (L 8-0 vs. Vermont Reds)
Eastern League Championships: None
Stadia
1983: Bleecker Stadium
Opened: 1934
1983-1984: Heritage Park
Opened: 1983
Demolished: 2009
Ownership & Affiliation
Owner: Ben Bernard
Major League Affiliation: Oakland Athletics
Attendance
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Source: The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (3rd ed.), Lloyd Johnson & Miles Wolff, 2007. Pages 604 – 608.
Background
This Class AA farm club was Exhibit A of the skyrocketing marketplace for minor league baseball clubs during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. During the fall of 1982, Ben Bernard scraped together $100,000 to purchase the Eastern League’s defending champion West Haven A’s. Bernard, a young man in his late 20’s, knew the Eastern League well. He had recently resigned as General Manager of the league’s Glens Falls White Sox club. Bernard would ultimately sell the team for a reported $2.3 million just five years later.
Bernard moved the team to Colonie, a suburb of Albany, where town and county officials rushed to erect 5,500-seat Heritage Park in time for the 1983 season. The ballpark was not ready in time, held up by a lawsuit filed by the last remaining members of the Shaker religious sect, who argued the project would desecrate the grave of Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee, who was buried in a Shaker cemetery that abutted a planned parking lot for the project. The A’s opened the 1983 season at 50-year old Bleecker Stadium in downtown Albany before moving to Heritage Park when it opened in July 1983.
In Competition
The Albany-Colonie A’s won the 1984 Eastern League pennant with a league-best 81-57 record. But they lost in a three-game sweep to the eventual champion Vermont Reds in the first round of the playoffs.
Notable players that came through Albany-Colonie during the short-lived A’s era included catchers Charlie O’Brien and Mickey Tettleton and pitcher Tim Belcher. Tettleton became a two-time American League All-Star. Belcher, drafted #1 overall in the 1983 MLB draft, went onto to win 146 games in the Majors.
Tim Belcher was the last active member of the Albany-Colonie A’s when he pitched his final Major League game in September 2000. Charlie O’Brien played his final game earlier the same year.
Yankees Era & Aftermath
In September 1984 the New York Yankees replaced Oakland as Albany-Colonie’s parent club. The team’s popularity shot through the roof in 1985 as a Yankees farm club and Albany-Colonie shattered the Eastern League annual attendance record with 324,003 fans that summer.
But by the early 1990’s, modest Heritage Park was already outdated. The Yankees departed in 1994 and the Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs of the independent Northeast League set up shop in 1995. The Diamond Dogs played at Heritage Park from 1995 to 2002.
Heritage Park was demolished in 2009.
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