Glens Falls Tigers

Eastern League (1986-1988)

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Glens Falls Tigers
Logo T-Shirt

Glens Falls, New York hosted the Detroit Tigers Eastern League farm club for just three seasons during the late 1980’s. One cool decision the front office made was to adopt and adapt Detroit’s 1970’s era alternate logo as their own.

This design is also now  available in a women’s cut or as Crewneck or Hoodie sweatshirt from 90s Teams.

 

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Background

Minor League Baseball came to the small Adirondack region city of Glens Falls, New York in the spring of 1980. A pair of Proctor & Gamble employees from New York City, Frank Schafer & Dick Stanley, responded to an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal, hawking the opportunity to buy a minor league baseball franchise. The seller was the Eastern League, a 6-team Class AA circuit with teams in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania.

The franchise initially struggled to finds its footing during the winter of 1979-80. A plan to locate in Schenectady fell through. Schafer, Stanley and their parent club, the Chicago White Sox, scrambled to find a Plan B, and wound up in Glens Falls. The city hastily erected East Field in the spring of 1980 in a matter of weeks to host the team. But the ballpark had no lights that first year and the 1980 Glens Falls White Sox played exclusively day games.

Nevertheless, the team stabilized and became a durable member of the Eastern League for most of the 1980’s. The White Sox moved their Class AA operations to Birmingham, Alabama following the 1985 season and the Detroit Tigers took over as Glens Falls’ sponsor for the next three summers: 1986 to 1988.

Key Players

More than two dozen Glens Falls Tigers players ultimately advanced to Major League Baseball. The two most prominent products of the Tigers era were catcher Chris Hoiles (Glens Falls ’87-’88) and pitcher John Smoltz (Glens Falls ’87), though both were traded as minor leaguers and never played a game for Detroit.

Hoiles went on to become a stellar offensive and defensive catcher for the Baltimore Orioles during a 10-year Major League career from 1989 to 1998. He is a member of the Orioles Hall of Fame.

Smoltz was pitching for Glens Falls when he was traded to the Atlanta Braves organization midway through the 1987 season. Smoltz debuted in the Majors with Atlanta the following spring and embarked on a remarkable Hall of Fame career that stretched for 22 seasons. Dominant as both a starter and a reliever, Smoltz won the National League Cy Young Award in 1996 and is the only pitcher in Major League history to record over 200 wins and over 150 saves. He was elected to Cooperstown in his first year of eligibility in 2015.

Departure & Aftermath

Midway through the 1988 season, the franchise announced it would move over the border to London, Ontario in 1989. The team finished out its lame duck season with the best record in the Eastern League (80-57), but fell to the eventual champion Albany-Colonie Yankees in the opening round of the playoffs in September 1988.

Pro baseball returned to East Field five years later with the Class A Glens Falls Redbirds of the New York-Penn League. That club used Glens Falls as merely a temporary pitstop while awaiting the construction of a new ballpark in New Jersey, however, and left town after one season. The independent Adirondack Lumberjacks took up in residence in 1995 and stayed until 2002.

The franchise that was once the Glens Falls Tigers still exists today as the Trenton Thunder. The team played in the Eastern League until 2019, but subsequently lost its 2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then was exiled from professional baseball during the Major League Baseball takeover and re-organization of the Minors. The Thunder are now a collegiate amateur team that will compete in the MLB Draft League in 2021.

Glens Falls Tigers Shop

Links

Eastern League Media Guides

Eastern League Programs

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