The Bend Timber Hawks were, ever so briefly, a Central Oregon-based farm club of the Oakland Athletics. The franchise joined the Northwest League in 1978 as part of an expansion that saw the short-season Class A circuit expand from six to eight teams that summer. Following the 1978 season, owner Doug Emmans moved the franchise to Medford, Oregon but the Northwest League swiftly put a new team into Bend, the Central Oregon Phillies, for the 1979 campaign.
We’re talking Rochester, Minnesota today, not New York. The Rochester Aces were one of six original franchises that launched independent baseball’s Northern League during the summer of 1993. Three of these clubs – the St. Paul Saints (now the triple-A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins), the Sioux City Explorers and the Sioux Falls Canaries – are still around today, nearly three decades later. But the Aces saw the weakest community response of the original six and lasted just a single season in Minnesota’s third-largest city.
The Motor City Mustangs were a pro roller hockey promotion that played one season at Cobo Arena in the summer of 1995. Detroit Red Wings star Shawn Burr owned the club, possibly along with Red Wings teammate Dino Ciccarelli, who was cagey at best about his participation in the adventure. Tony Szabo, a veteran of Northern Michigan University’s 1991 NCAA ice hockey national championship team, scored 50 goals for the Mustangs and was named Roller Hockey International’s 1995 Player of the Year. But the Mustangs were a flop at the box office and went out of business after just one season.
This doomed 2nd division men’s club was part of the disastrous Lehigh Valley Multi-Purpose Stadium project, intended to bring minor league baseball and pro soccer to the Easton/Allentown region of Pennsylvania during the late 1990’s. The Steam would be the region’s first outdoor pro soccer team since the Pennsylvania Stoners, who played out of Allentown and Bethlehem, folded in 1984. When the stadium project failed to come to fruition, the Steam embarked on a single, futile season in the USL A-League during the summer of 1999, cobbling together a schedule of “home” matches in various sites around Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Steam officially disbanded in December 1999.
The Orlando Sundogs were a pro soccer team that endured a single grim campaign in the USISL A-League during the summer of 1997. The A-League was the 2nd Division of men’s pro soccer in the U.S. at the time, one level below Major League Soccer. The Sundogs’ troubles were many, but a big one was their choice of stadium: the 64,000 Citrus Bowl, a former World Cup (1994) and Olympic (1996) stadium. The ‘Dogs averaged an invisible 1,278 fans per match in the gargantuan bowl.
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