Baseball in Colorado Springs
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About this ebook
Roger P. Hadix
Colorado Springs sports historian and author Roger P. Hadix has collected rare photographs from each decade of the late 19th and 20th centuries, chronicling the national pastime as played throughout the Pikes Peak region. For the past 19 years, Hadix has also lived the history by playing vintage base ball with the Colorado Vintage Base Ball Association.
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Baseball in Colorado Springs - Roger P. Hadix
intentional.
INTRODUCTION
Deep drive, long fly ball, that’s way back, and she is gone!
That is a typical home run call of play-by-play announcer Dan Karcher for today’s Colorado Springs Sky Sox radio broadcast. For the past 25 years, Colorado Springs has enjoyed AAA minor league professional baseball, courtesy of the Sky Sox. However, organized baseball began in Colorado Springs a long time ago.
The first report of a team being organized to play baseball in the area was in the Colorado Springs Gazette of May 31, 1873: Colorado Springs is to have a Base Ball club. And why not? We find it hard enough to string together a page of local items for the Gazette and anything which will produce a few more ‘accidents’ [events] will be a perfect Godsend to us.
About a week later, on June 7, an article stated, The Base Ball Club played their first game on Saturday afternoon last. We had a reporter on the grounds, but he came back disconsolate, for there were no accidents [events] worthy of note.
The 1874 IXL Club, presumably sponsored by the IXL Creamery, was the first named, organized team to play baseball in the Pikes Peak region. Colorado College fielded a baseball team from its earliest days, referred to by the paper as the College Boys, or Freshmen. Other teams were known as the Athletics, Experts, and Tray Artists.
By 1880, Gen. William Jackson Palmer, founder of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and the city of Colorado Springs, joined Denver and Leadville in establishing a state baseball league. The Denver & Rio Grande Reds, or Colorado Springs Reds, as they were also known, played the Denver Brown Stockings and the Leadville Blues. The Colorado Springs Base Ball Club, referred to as the Millionaires
in the paper, was the city’s first professional team, playing from 1901 to 1905 and for one more season, in 1916. A city league, run by former Colorado Springs Millionaire player Burt Jones, lasted throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. In the 1940s, Colorado Springs had a black semipro baseball team known as the Brown Bombers. Due to the efforts of H. Chase Stone and Bill MacPhail, professional baseball returned to Colorado Springs. The Sky Sox were the Class-A minor-league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox and played in the Western League from 1950 to 1958, winning pennants in 1953, 1955, and 1958.
Unfortunately, Colorado College eliminated its men’s baseball program in 1995. The US Air Force Academy, however, continues to field a men’s baseball team. During the 1970s and most of the 1980s, softball was the only ball being played in Colorado Springs. In 1988, Dave Elmore chose Colorado Springs over Sacramento as the new home of his Hawaii Islanders. The city benefited from the efforts of people such as Harry Salzman and the committee that brought the Islanders to Colorado Springs. The Sky Sox continue their relationship with Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies. Many Sky Sox players get a chance to showcase their talents for the big-league team, only 65 miles away via