Can you feel it? Baseball is in the air

Major League Baseball is still considered “America’s game” by many sports fans who are in the process of getting lathered up for the traditional Opening Day of the regular season on March 27.

But for now, all eyes in the baseball world are focused on the exhibition games being played in the Grapefruit League in Florida and the Cactus League in Arizona. Each of these spring training leagues is made up of 15 professional teams.

The Grapefruit League came first. Beginning in 1913-14, the respective mayors of Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., actively recruited pro teams to travel south to practice ahead of the regular season. They viewed the expense of putting up an entire team for an extended stay as an investment in tourism development. Other communities followed suit.

In 1915, the Brooklyn Dodgers established a spring training base in Daytona Beach, and the team manager – Wilbert “Uncle Robbie” Robinson – cooked up a publicity stunt to attract fans. 

He was “aided and abetted” by a brash, young Dodgers’ outfielder named Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel.

 

They learned about a dare devil female aviator who was dropping golf balls out of her airplane to promote Daytona Beach golf courses. If Ruth Bancroft Law were to drop a baseball from 500 feet above the Dodgers’ practice field, could Robinson catch it in a big old catcher’s mitt? Stengel bet he couldn’t.

 

On the designated flight, Law threw ‘em a “curve ball,” so to speak, dropping a grapefruit instead of a baseball. Robinson was clueless; he was focused on snagging the speeding sphere (traveling at about 95 mph). The grapefruit “exploded” when it smacked into his leather mitt.

 

Writing for the Society for American Baseball Research, Joe Guzzardi said: “Onlookers recalled that the Dodgers manager, now felled and covered in sticky red juices, thought he was mortally wounded. A dazed Robbie called out: ‘Help me, lads, I’m covered with my own blood.’”

“Only when the Dodgers rushed over to Robinson’s side but burst out laughing hysterically did the manager realize that he had been the target of a friendly joke gone bad,” Guzzardi wrote.

One sports historian suggested that Ruth Law made the switch because she thought the softer grapefruit was “less likely to kill the man if he misjudged the ball and got plunked on the noggin.”

Stengel reportedly quipped that his manager “couldn’t cut it in the Grapefruit League.”

Local sportswriters took it from there. The Grapefruit League became an institution.

The Cactus League name is said to have arisen naturally “as a direct reference to the abundance of cacti in the desert landscape of Arizona.”

The founding father of the Cactus League was Bill Veeck, a veteran baseball man, who in 1946 purchased a cattle ranch in the Rincon Mountains, east of Tucson, as a retirement retreat.

Freelance journalist Emma Miller said that Veeck bought the Cleveland Indians baseball club about the same time, “sparking the idea” that his players might prefer participating in spring training in Arizona, rather than Florida.

“To do that, the Indians would need someone to play against,” Miller wrote. “Veeck called up New York Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham, who had business ventures and a winter home in Phoenix.” 

“In 1947, the pair moved their respective spring training regimens to the Grand Canyon State – and that was the birth of what’s now known as the Cactus League.”

 

Veeck arranged to base his Cleveland ball team in Tucson at Randolph Municipal Baseball Park. (In 1951, the park was renamed as Hi Corbett Field, in honor of Hiram “Hi” Stevens Corbett, a former Arizona state senator who represented Pima County and Tucson.)

Matt Monagan, who writes for MLB.com, said: “Horace Stoneham visited the Buckhorn Baths and Motel in Mesa (near Phoenix), which had these amazing hot springs, commenting ‘this is a great place for my team to recover from injuries, to rest, to relax and get ready for the season.”

 

Stoneham described how the mineral waters were used to “cook out muscular kinks” and “melt away excess poundage.”

“And so the modest motel, owned by local entrepreneurs Ted and Alice Sliger, became home to the Giants for 25 years,” Monahan said. (The team would travel about 20 miles to Phoenix Municipal Stadium for spring training workouts and exhibition games.)

“The Sligers held massive barbecues for players and their families,” Monahan said. “Large welcome signs greeted them upon their arrival. It was a home away from home, with the Sligers and the rest of the staff serving as players’ adopted parents.”

 

Mesa historian and author Jay Mark told Monagan: “The Buckhorn itself became a celebrity. Not only athletes, but Hollywood people stayed there. President (Harry) Truman’s daughter (Mary Margaret Truman Daniel) had health issues, and she stayed at the Buckhorn for three months. This became a very famous, popular, well-known place.”

Mark added that President John F. Kennedy used the Buckhorn springs to heal injuries suffered while serving with the Navy in during World War II.

 

“Many a layman who had grown flabby and had lost his bounce checked in at the Buckhorn Baths and emerged a couple of weeks later, asking for a baseball bat,” Mark concluded.

 

Who were these guys – Veeck and Stoneham?

In a sense, Bill Veeck and Horace Stoneham were peas in a pod, the sons of Major League Baseball executives who followed in their fathers’ footsteps.

Bill Veeck Jr. was born in 1914 in Chicago to William Veeck Sr. and Grace Greenwood DeForest Veeck. The senior Veeck was the president of the Chicago Cubs.

Young Bill broke into the “business” working as an office boy and popcorn vendor, but he was elevated to management by team owner William Wrigley Jr., when Bill Veeck Sr. died in 1933.

 

Bill Veeck Jr.’s most notable contribution to the Cubs was when he planted the famous ivy on the outfield wall at Wrigley Field in 1937.

Horace Charles Stoneham was born in Newark, N.J., in 1903 to Charles Stoneham and Johanna McGoldrick Stoneham. Charles Stoneham was the owner of the New York Giants professional baseball team.

Rob Garratt and Steve Treder, writers with the Society for American Baseball Research, said the elder Stoneham was intent on grooming his son to take over management of the ball club one day, but he was displeased with his Horace’s “free and easy lifestyle” displayed as a first-year student at Fordham University in New York City.

Horace Stoneham was promptly yanked out of school in the winter of 1923-24 to work in a California copper mine, “to see something of the harder side of life and to learn the ways of the world,” Garratt and Treder said.

 

Having survived the “western boot camp,” experience, Horace began the 1924 baseball season as an “apprentice” in the Giants’ organization, working on the grounds crew and in the ticket office. He gradually assumed increasing levels of management responsibility.

In 1936, at age 32, Horace inherited ownership of the Giants, upon his father’s death due to a heart attack.

As team owners, Bill Veeck and Horace Stoneham assumed pioneering roles in 1947 – opening up Arizona as an alternative location to Florida for Major League Baseball spring training sites. Veeck owned the Cleveland Indians, while Stoneham held the reins with the New York Giants.

Signing Hall of Famer Bob Feller (left), ace of the Cleveland pitching staff, to a long-term contract was a priority for Veeck.

Veeck and Stoneham also were in the forefront of the movement to add African-American players to professional baseball team rosters.

The man who broke the “color barrier” on April 15, 1947, was 28-year-old Jackie Robinson of Cairo, Ga. Robinson was signed by Branch Rickey of the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African-American to play Major League Baseball.

 

Just six weeks later, Larry Doby, a 23-year-old from Camden, S.C., was signed by Veeck to join the Cleveland Indians and become the first ever Black player in the American League.

 

Veeck made headlines once again in 1948, when he recruited the legendary Negro League right-handed pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige of Mobile, Ala., to join Cleveland as a 42-year-old rookie.

 

In early 1949, Stoneham signed former Negro Leaguers Monte Irvin, 29, of Haleburg, Ala., and Hank Thompson, 23, of Oklahoma City into the Giants’ organization. Upon their promotion to the big-league roster in July of that year, the Giants became the second National League franchise to be racially integrated.

“The Giants’ commitment to integration, while by no means as courageous as that of the Dodgers two years earlier, was still a momentous act,” commented Garratt and Treder. “It sent a signal to the rest of baseball, and to the nation at large. The New York Giants were in, and thereby integration was given a crucial push toward the unstoppable momentum it would eventually achieve.”

“Irvin and Thompson were just the first in a long and remarkable line of athletes of color the Giants would employ, including, of course, the incomparable Willie Mays.” As a 20-year-old phenom from Westfield, Ala., Mays made his major league debut with the Giants in 1951.”

 

Monte Irvin, Willie Mays and Hank Thompson. On Oct. 4, 1951, in the opening game of the World Series, the Giants’ starting outfield was Irvin in left field, Mays in center, and Thompson in right, the first all-black outfield alignment in major-league history.

Garratt and Treder declared: “In the 1950s and ’60s, no franchise was more productive in the recruitment and development of African-American and Latin American talent than Stoneham’s Giants. This was no accident, as Stoneham and farm system director Carl Hubbell worked diligently to gain unsurpassed presence, knowledge and credibility in the African-American and Latin American baseball communities.”

Stoneham’s legacy includes his decision to abandon the Polo Grounds in New York City’s Upper Manhattan neighborhood and relocate the Giants in 1958 to San Fracisco and Candlestick Park.

 

“Nothing he did provoked more heartache or ecstasy than his bringing the Giants west,” reported Johnny Miller, a contributor to SFGATE, a digital portal serving California’s Bay Area.  in 1958.

 

Ted & Alice Sliger built Buckhorn Baths into a ‘destination’

A Texan by birth, Theodore William Sliger decided to put down roots in Mesa, Ariz., in the 1920s, opening a service station on the main road east of town.

He met a local girl, Alice Annette O’Barr. The couple married in 1935. The original service station had burned down.

Now, working together as business partners, Ted and Alice Sliger found an ideal piece of property about seven miles east of Mesa, in the unincorporated community known as Buckhorn, located along the legendary Apache Trail (U.S. Route 60) leading into Phoenix.

That transaction set in motion a series of events that would lead to the development of the world-famous Buckhorn Baths.

 

“With the brutal desert heat, and water as a necessity, the couple got tired of hauling in fresh water from Mesa. They put together enough money to drill a well on their land,” a local historian said. “The result was undrinkable, hot, odorless mineral water. Well, the Sligers made the most of it and began to promote Buckhorn Hot Mineral Wells in 1939.”

The Sligers advertised their hot springs as having curative powers “beneficial in the treatment of arthritis, neuritis, neuralgia, gout, anemia, sciatic, overweight, underweight, high blood pressure, nicotine poisoning, blood and skin diseases, kidney, bladder and liver troubles, chronically nervous and exhausted, inflammatory rheumatism, stomach disorders (and) rehabilitation following: strokes, polio, fractures. Also good for muscle toning and reconditioning.”

According to signage at the site, the mineral content of the water included “silica, calcium, sodium, nitrate, fluoride, sulphate, magnesium, bicarbonate, potassium, hydrogen and iron.” The hot mineral water emerged at temperatures ranging from 112 to 128 degrees F. Cooling towers were added to decrease the temperatures to a more tolerable level of 98 to 104 degrees F.

The Sligers’ enterprise soon included 27 stone tubs, a resort motel with 15 adobe-style cottages and attached carports, a café, a curio shop, a full-service gas station and repair shop as well as a nine-hole golf course.

They bought old bricks for $5 per thousand from a local school that was being torn down to build a trading post complete with a Greyhound bus station. It took a staff of 25 people to run the entire Buckhorn Baths complex.

 

According to the historian, “when local cowboys came through town and needed food and a place to stay, they’d be put to work in exchange for labor” to expand the Sligers’ facilities.

 “Ted was a skilled taxidermist and started a small animal museum to bring in customers. More than 450 animals were on display.”

The star of the show at the museum was Ted Sliger’s signature trophy, “Old Renegade,” an ornery male buffalo that had terrorized local ranchers for years and years.

 

Author Jay Mark, writing for The Mesa Tribune in 2024, said state wildlife officials approached Ted Sliger about leading a hunting party to go out into the desert in 1942 and track the beast. He agreed, and “word of the pursuit caught the attention of the entire country. Dozens of newspapers covered the search in great detail,” Mark said.

“Finally, Ted Sliger got a bead on Old Renegade with his high-powered rifle.” It took four bullets to topple Old Renegade.

“It took more than two hours to skin and quarter the carcass, after which the buffalo took the long journey back to Mesa, where it was carefully taxidermized by Ted Sliger. The meat was dry-aged,” Mark said.

“A month later, Ted and Alice invited 4,000 friends out to the Buckhorn for a gigantic barbecue. Among the 3,000 pounds of meat served was part of Old Renegade.”

After Ted died in 1984, Alice continued to run the place, but she finally shut the doors in 2004. Alice died in 2010 at age 103.

One of the great joys in Alice Sliger’s life was staying in touch with the professional baseball players who spent their spring training seasons at Buckhorn Baths as members of the New York/San Francisco Giants from 1947-72.

Among her favorites was Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry, who played with the Giants from 1962-71. He hailed from Williamston in Martin County, N.C.

 

Commenting for Alice Sliger’s obituary in 2010, Perry told Mike Sakal of the East Valley Tribune in Tempe, Ariz.: “She always had a welcome smile on her face and would always talk about the events of the day. She really loved the place. They started that business when nothing was out there.”

As a supporter of the Mesa Historical Museum, Alice Sliger donated several vintage photographs and artifacts from the Buckhorn to the “Play Ball” exhibit that was dedicated in 2009. Perry was in many of the photos, Sakal noted.

Gaylord Perry was reunited with Alice Sliger, as both attended the exhibit’s grand opening reception. “It was a special moment,” said Robert Johnson, project leader for the “Play Ball” exhibit.

Johnson took many photographs that day of Sliger and Perry looking at the old pictures that chronicled the history of the Buckhorn.

“When she looked at the old pictures, she knew the names and the stories. It was really a nice moment,” Johnson said. “There were other players in the pictures, but it seemed like they didn’t exist. She just talked about Gaylord Perry. When she saw Gaylord, everything she had once knew came rushing back.”