Tag: One-Year Wonders

Salt Lake Padres Pacific Coast League

Salt Lake Padres

November 27, 2020

For one season, during the summer of 1970, Salt Lake City, Utah hosted the top farm club of the San Diego Padres in the Pacific Coast League. The Salt Lake Padres suffered a wretched season on the field and the short-lived partnership remains sufficiently obscure that both Baseball-Reference.com and some editions of The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball published by Baseball America mis-identify the 1970 Salt Lake teams as the “Bees”, the historic name used by various Salt Lake City clubs dating back to the early 19th century.

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Mobile Athletics Southern League

Mobile Athletics

November 12, 2020

Minor League Baseball returned to Mobile, Alabama in 1966 after a four-year absence. Kansas City Athletics owner Charles O. Finley transferred his team’s Class AA Birmingham farm club to the Azalea City after failing to come to an agreement for a new lease on Birmingham’s Rickwood Field. During the A’s lone summer in Mobile, the ball club ran away with the 1966 Southern League pennant, thanks to a club packed with future Major League stars such as Sal Bando, Rick Monday and Blue Moon Odom. Following the 1966 season, Finley moved the team back to Birmingham.

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Western Massachusetts Pioneers (1973)

October 25, 2020

The Western Massachusetts Pioneers football team was a minor league outfit based out of Holyoke, Massachusetts during the autumn of 1973. The team was an expansion franchise in the Atlantic Coast Football League that fall, playing against competition from Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York. The Pioneers won only one game on the field (picking up a second win via forfeit) and the disbanded along with the rest of the ACFL after the 1973 season.

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Tucson Turquoise International Volleyball Association

Tucson Turquoise

October 23, 2020

The Tucson Turquoise were an expansion franchise that debuted during the second season of the co-ed International Volleyball Association in 1976. The team lasted for only one tumultuous season, constantly shuffling its roster and finishing in last place with an 11-29 record. In 1977 new owners took over and re-named the team the Tucson Sky.

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Gastonia Jets

October 21, 2020

The Gastonia Jets were a minor league baseball One-Year Wonder in the Class A South Atlantic League. The team formed out of necessity when Gastonia owner Jack Farnsworth was unable to secure a Major League parent club for the 1985 season. After a last place finish as the Jets in 1985, the team became the Gastonia Tigers in 1986 when Detroit agreed to take the Farnsworth’s club into its farm system.

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