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B a s e b a l l
M e x i c o
October 4, 2 0 1 7
BBM 2017 Summer Awards: Manager
of the Year / Batter
of the Year / Playoff
MVP / MVP
Changing
of the Guard: What Is Mexican Baseball's Future?
In
Radical Departure, LMB to Play 2 Seasons in 2018
Mexican
Baseball Road Trip: Tucson, Arizona
Well, today is
the day I hop
on a plane in Portland, Oregon and travel to Tucson, Arizona for this
week's
seventh edition of the Mexican Baseball Fiesta, in which four Mexican
Pacific
league teams plus a squad of Cincinnati Reds minor leaguers will play
four
doubleheaders in as many days at Kino Veterans Memorial Stadium. It's been quite a few years since BBM's last
virtual Mexican Baseball Road Trip through all 24 MexPac and Mexican
League
cities (October 2009 through March 2010, to be exact...they're all
archived on
this site), but since Tucson constitutes a REAL road trip, it seems
appropriate
to add the Old Pueblo to the list, making it the first city in the USA
profiled
here.
Tucson, Arizona
can be reached from Mexico by crossing the
border at the Sonora city of Nogales, which has thousands of residents
in both
countries, and driving 60 miles north on Interstate 19 past the towns
of Tubac
and Green Valley along the way. For what
it's worth, I-19 is the only interstate highway in the USA marked by
kilometer
posts instead of mileposts. Tucson
itself sits on an alluvial plain in the Sonoran Desert and is
surrounded by
five minor mountain ranges. The dry, hot
climate brings the city an average of 11.56 inches of rain per year
with
daytime high temperatures ranging from the mid-60's in December and
January to
the high-90's and low-100's in June and July.
Low temperatures during winter are typically around 40 degrees
while
summertime lows rarely dip below 70.
What is now
Tucson was first occupied by paleo-Indians as
early as 12,000 B.C. and an archeological dig that turned up a village
dating
from 2,100 B.C. Indigenous people later
farmed the area near the Santa Cruz River for centuries, building
extensive
irrigation canal systems for corn and bean crops. Ceramic
pottery was developed between 600 and
1450 A.D. for cooking and storage.
Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino first visited the area
in 1692
and later oversaw the construction of Mission Xavier del Bac in 1700. Hugh O'Conor, an Irish-born officer in the
Spanish Army, is considered the founder of Tucson after establishing a
military
fort there in 1775. The Spaniards faced
a number of attacks from Apaches over time until Mexico was granted
independence from Spain in 1821, at which time Tucson (the name was
gradually
adopted over time) became a Sonoran city.
Tucson was a way station on an important route to California
during the
1849 Gold Rush.
What is the
present-day state of Arizona was acquired by the
USA as part of its 1854 Gadsden Purchase treaty with Mexico and Tucson
continued as a stage station into the early 1860's, when it actually
became the
western capital of the Confederate Arizona Territory between 1861 and
1862
during the Civil War until the rebels were driven out by the California
Column. Tucson later served as capital
of the USA's Arizona Territory between 1867 and 1877, becoming the
first
Arizona city to incorporate during the latter year.
The University of Arizona was founded there
in 1885 and by 1900, Tucson had a population of 7,531.
The city gradually grew over the decades
(although there was a boom from a population of 45,454 in 1950 to
212,892 in
1960) and is now home to an estimated 530,706 residents, 41.6 percent
of whom
are of Hispanic heritage. Tucson's
growth has been outward more than upward, with relatively few high-rise
buildings in comparison with other cities of similar size.
Tucson has
become a tech hub over recent years, earning the
nickname of the "Optics Valley."
Several major corporations have a presence in the city,
including
Raytheon, Texas Instruments, IBM, Intuit and Honeywell.
The University of Arizona, which now has over
43,000 students, has become a driving cultural and economic force in
Tucson,
and holds the nation's fourth-largest book festival with 450 authors
and 80,000
attendees. The Tucson Gem & Mineral
Show is the largest such event in the United States while the Tucson
Folk
Festival, Fourth Avenue Street Fair, Tucson Rodeo and All SOuls
Procession
Weekend have also become popular events.
Baseball has had
a long, if somewhat spotty, presence in
Tucson. The Old Pueblos team played in
the Class D Rio Grande Association in 1915, building a 19-40 record
until the
league folded in July of that year.
While semipro and amateur baseball kept the sport going for
years
afterward, minor league baseball didn't return until 1928, when the
Tucson
Cowboys finished last in the Class D Arizona State League.
This started an on-again, off-again pattern
of teams in Tucson, with the Depression shutting down the Arizona-Texas
League
for four years in the 1930's and World War II shutting the A-TL down
for
another five seasons in the early 1940's.
It was during this time that a 9,500-seat ballpark now known as
Hi Corbett
Field was erected in 1937. Tucson won
the league's pennant under Cowboys manager Pat Patterson in 1941, the
last year
the loop operated before going dark during wartime.
From 1947 until 1958, Tucson continued to
field teams at the Class C and D levels in regional leagues, winning
the Arizona-Texas
League title in 1953 by 13 games with Don Jameson as skipper.
After the A-TL
folded following the 1958 as part of the
decline of minor league ball during that era, there was no pro ball in
Tucson
until 1969, although the city had been a spring training site for the
Cleveland
Indians since 1947, when Bill Veeck (who owned a ranch in the area)
brought his
newly-acquired team to Hi Corbett Field from Florida, reportedly to
avoid the
latter's Jim Crow laws of the time.
Indians players often rode horses on Veeck's property after
games. Still, it took the ascension
of San Diego
and Seattle to the major leagues for the Pacific Coast League to place
a
franchise in Tucson. The Toros (so designated in a "Name the Team"
contest by future Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik) represented
Tucson
through the 1997 season, winning PCL titles in 1991 and 1993 as
affiliates of
the Houston Astros. The team name was
changed to Sidewinders between 1998 and 2008, winning a third PCL
pennant for
Tucson in 1996 as the Arizona Diamondbacks' AAA affiliate.
However, 2008 proved to be the final year for
the Sidewinders in the PCL before the franchise moved to Reno the
following
year. Another Toros team popped up in
2009 and spent two years in the independent Golden Baseball League
before the
PCL returned in 2011 when the Portland Beavers spent three seasons
there as the
renamed Tucson Padres before that franchise moved to El Paso in 2014. The city has not had an affiliated minor
league
team since, although the Tucson Saguaros have spent the last two
summers
playing in the independent Pecos League, winning the 2016 pennant and
finishing
with the loop's best record in 2017 before losing to High Desert in the
playoffs.
By then, Tucson
teams had moved from Hi Corbett Field to
8,000-seat Kino Veterans Memorial Stadium, which was completed in 1998
and
originally known as Tucson Electric Park, to accommodate the MLB
Diamondbacks
and Chicago White Sox for spring training while the Indians continued
using Hi
Corbett Field four miles to the north, although all three organizations
have
since relocated to spring facilities in the Phoenix area.
Kino Stadium has a grass berm rimming the
outfield that can hold another 3,000 to allow a total of 11,500 people
(including standees) for ballgames. The
ballpark, which will host the Mexican Baseball Fiesta this week for the
seventh
year in a row, is symmetrical with distances of 340 feet to each foul
line and
405 feet to straightaway center field.
Owned by Pima County, Kino Stadium was built for $38 million. The facility has also been used as a
training camp for the New York Red Bulls of Major League Soccer and
matches in
the annual Desert Diamond Cup, which is now a six-team MLS preseason
tournament
won last February by the Houston Dynamo.
