Elmira Royals

Eastern League (1971)

Background

Since 1935, generations of Elmira, New York baseball teams have played under the “Pioneers” name in various minor league and amateur collegiate leagues.  Aside from a handful of dreary summers with no baseball at all played at Dunn Field, there have only been two interruptions in the Pioneers brand. In 1982 and 1983, Elmira’s New York-Penn League club played under the name “Suns” because the team had been purchased by a man who made good money in the cemetery business and used it to amass a sizable but short-lived nationwide collection of minor league baseball teams all known as the Suns.

And the other exception was the 1971 Elmira Royals of the Class AA Eastern League.

Now Elmira had some past history with the Kansas City Royals. In 1969 and 1970, the Pioneers had a split affiliation with both Kansas City and the San Diego Padres. Both were 1969 Major League expansion clubs – Kansas City in the American League and San Diego in the National League. In 1970, the Padres departed and the Royals signed an exclusive player development contract with Elmira’s local owners.

Following the 1970 season Kansas City bought out the local Elmira stockholders and dropped the Pioneers name. 1971 would be the first season that Elmira operated under directed ownership of a Major League organization since the Brooklyn Dodgers owned the Pioneers between 1950 and 1955.

Championship Summer

From a pure wins and losses standpoint, Kansas City provided Elmira with a highly competitive club under the direction of field manager Harry Malmberg, who returned from the 1970 Pioneers. This was a nice change for local fans. Malmberg’s 1970 squad finished dead last in the Eastern circuit with a dreadful 55-84 performance.

The Royals easily won their division with a 78-61 record, earning the right the face the Trois-Rivieres Aigles, the Cincinnati Reds’ Quebec-based farm club, in the Eastern League championship series.

The Royals won the best-of-five series in four games. The decisive game was a 2-1 nail-biter on September 11th, 1971 with Eastern League All-Star third baseman Gary Sanserino driving home the championship clinching run with two out in the bottom of the 10th inning before 1,139 fans at Dunn Field.

Despite the Elmira Royals’ winning ways in the Eastern circuit that summer, the club was shockingly unproductive for a Class AA farm team from a developmental standpoint. Of the seven members of the 1971 club to play Major League Baseball, three had already played their final games in The Show prior to the 1971 season. Of the remaining four players still on the way up the ladder, none would play in the Majors beyond 1973.

Royal Exit

Eleven days after the Royals won the 1971 title, Kansas City announced they were dropping the franchise. Elmira’s status was uncertain for about a month, until a pair of young promoters, Kip Horsburgh and Carl Fazio, secured a new Eastern League franchise and a player development contract with the Cleveland Indians that assured double-A baseball would return to Dunn Field in 1972. Horsburgh and Fazio re-instated the Pioneers identity for the ball club.

Elmira Royals manager Harry Malmberg moved up the ladder in the Royals organization to manage the Class AAA Omaha Royals in 1973 and 1974. Malmberg was scheduled to go to work for expansion Seattle Mariners when the joined the American League in 1977, but pancreatic cancer claimed his life in October 1976 at the young age of 51.

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