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    Baseball in Long Beach
    Baseball in Long Beach
    Baseball in Long Beach
    Ebook217 pages42 minutes

    Baseball in Long Beach

    By Tom Meigs

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Organized baseball in Long Beach dates to 1910, when
    the Long Beach Clothiers of the Southern California
    Trolley League played opponents wherever a streetcar could take them. Exhibition games later featured Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, and other Major League barnstormers. Homegrown talent includes Baseball Hall of Famers Bob Lemon and Tony Gwynn. Pioneering entrepreneur Bill Feistner built the first accommodating baseball park in 1922 at Redondo Avenue and Stearns Street in the shadow of oil-rich Signal Hill. When ballplayers weren t on the Shell Park diamond, they worked the derricks.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMay 5, 2008
    ISBN9781439620588
    Baseball in Long Beach
    Author

    Tom Meigs

    Author Tom Meigs, an electronic-game developer, previously published Ultimate Game Design: Building Game Worlds. He pieced together this window into Long Beach�s sporting past with the help of the Old Timers, a group of legendary Long Beach area baseball players, scouts, umpires, and enthusiasts, as well as the Long Beach Collection at the Long Beach Public Library and The Topps Company, Inc.

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      Book preview

      Baseball in Long Beach - Tom Meigs

      2007

      INTRODUCTION

      The 1910 Long Beach Clothiers and the 1913 Long Beach Beachcombers of the Southern California Trolley League adjusted their ball class rankings by census figures and rambled around playing circuit games wherever a trolley could take them. The Beachcombers’ 1913 record stands at 43 wins and 46 losses despite having a management team that included Bull Durham.

      Passing decades soon brought exhibition games featuring players like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige. In time, an entire cascade of homegrown baseball talent, including MLB Hall of Fame players Bob Lemon and Tony Gwynn, would insure that Long Beach has definitively contributed to baseball history.

      On March 25, 1918, Grover Cleveland Alexander took the mound at old Poly High field as Alexander’s Cubs went on to beat Long Beach Polytechnic High School by a score of 4–1. Alexander must have enjoyed the locale because he ended up living in Long Beach for a period. Bill Feistner, one of the most pioneering and entrepreneurial spirits in baseball, built the first truly accommodating baseball park in 1922 at Redondo Avenue and Stearns Street in the shadows of oil-rich Signal Hill.

      Shell Park was Feistner’s creation, and when ballplayers were not on the ball field, they could often be found working the oil fields. Before construction on Shell Park was completed, 50 or more Ford Model Ts could be seen parked along the foul line doing their part to help define the fair from the foul. The 1925 world champion Pittsburgh Pirates created plenty of excitement when they visited Shell Park for a game in 1926, beating the home team, the Shell Oilers, by a score of 5-3.

      In 1924, Recreation Park opened for the public, creating a training ground for spectacular talent in the years to come. The Chicago Cubs, who trained on nearby Catalina Island, played the Pacific Coast League’s Los Angeles Angels team in the dedication game for Rec Park. The consistently good, year-round weather, and access to four softball playing fields combined to create the perfect atmosphere to nurture both softball and baseball talent.

      Strangely, two days of continuous rain—quite unusual weather in Long Beach—caused the cancellation of a game featuring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on Halloween Eve of 1927. Yet both returned to play a year later.

      The era of the 1930s produced several active semiprofessional teams. At the same time, the American Legion sponsored teams like the Ell Bees (pronounced LBs, as in Long Beach). The war years from 1942 to 1945 saw an entire lineup card of baseball talent stationed in Long Beach and nearby Santa Ana.

      During the late 1940s and the 1950s, the Long Beach Rockets were active. Tremendous contributions made by players and coaches alike allowed teams to play for several decades at Long Beach City College and Long Beach State University. The 1990s saw a veritable re-emergence of independent teams as the Long Beach Barracuda and Long Beach Riptide were established. The 2000s saw the tradition continue with the Long Beach Armada beginning play at Blair Field.

      1

      EARLY YEARS

      The largest personality in early Long Beach baseball was promoter William Bill W. Feistner, who created and managed the original Shell Oilers team and proceeded to promote local baseball for the next 50 years. In 1922, the Shell Oil Company agreed to build a ballpark for the Oilers at the corner of Stearns Street and Redondo Avenue.

      Before radio broadcasts of World Series games were available, the Long Beach Press established a magnetic scoring tower constructed on East Broadway Street and Lime Avenue. The game play board on the scoring tower featured a baseball diamond with moving parts operated manually by men working in the tower behind the board’s surface. Plays would come into the tower via telegraph, and workers would re-create each play by moving figures, operating the bat swing, and adjusting names. Peanut vendors provided snacks for those seated on wood planks and boxes in view of the scoring tower.

      An August 1922 doubleheader at Shell Park featured a jazz performance by Standard Oil’s 35-piece orchestra. The Shell Oilers won both games, 4-3 and 5-4.

      The Shell Baseball Park was officially dedicated on August 19, 1923, with a 4-1 victory over the Santa Fe Springs team from Union Oil. Connie Mack brought the 1929 and 1930 world champion Philadelphia Athletics to Shell Park to play Feistner’s Oilers in

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