Continental Basketball Association (1992-1993) Born: October 2, 1992 – Re-branded from Albany Patroons Moved: May 26, 1993 (Hartford Hellcats) First Game: November 21, 1992 (W 97-94
The Maryland Mustangs were an obscure United States Basketball League team that played for one season at the Show Place Arena in Prince Georges County during the spring of 2001. The team was coached by Boston Celtics legend and Professional Basketball Hall of Famer Robert Parish in his first – and only – professional head coaching gig. Parish won the USBL’s Coach of the Year honors for the Mustangs’ first year excellence. The Mustangs went out of business after completing their first and only season.
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.
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.
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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