The First Cactus League

In the beginning, they played in ballparks where no grass grew—“skin diamonds,” the players called them. And they entertained fans with doubleheaders even when summer temperatures rose to 118°. From Bisbee to Tucson, north to Phoenix, and on to Miami and Globe, they rode to games in long touring cars when most “highways” were still dusty, unpaved roads. At least once they had to stop a game to kill a rattlesnake in left field. They were the players of the first “cactus league,” a Class D circuit originally organized as the Arizona State League, which joined baseball’s long list of minor leagues in 1928. Bisbee, Miami, Phoenix, and Tucson were its first teams, joined the following year by Globe and, for half a season, Mesa.

The rivalry between copper mining towns turned into a season’s-end controversy when Miami and Bisbee came down to the last game of the championship series. “The seventh game at Miami,” reported the 1929 Reach Baseball Guide, “ended in a squabble. Miami was leading 13-6 in the eighth inning with darkness falling. Bisbee scored six runs in this inning and followed with two homers in the ninth when the crowd rushed the field. Miami protested the judgment of the umpire in permitting the game to continue, and [league] President Fred Joyce ruled that it was ‘no contest,’ and there the matter rests.” The next year, 1930, with the series championship tied at three games apiece between the Globe Bears and the Bisbee Bees, Globe refused to travel to Bisbee for the seventh and deciding game. This time President Joyce awarded the championship to Manager Roy (Hard Rock) Johnson and his Bisbee team.

A former major league pitcher and member of the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame, Thornton Lee of Tucson, recalls the long ride he and several teammates made from their native California across the desert and up the mountain road to Globe. It was the spring of 1929, and Lee was reporting to the Globe Bears. The tall, 200pound left-handed pitcher had been offered $250 a month, along with an extra $100 a month put up by the mining company, whose officers recognized baseball as a principal source of entertainment for their employees. On arrival Lee found a ballpark located not far from where the Old Dominion Mine dumped its slag, a grassless field where each player got his turn with a rake and wheelbarrow to smooth the dirt and remove the rocks around his position before a practice or a game. “We were ready to turn right around and go back to California,” remembers Lee, now 83.

(DIAGONALLY FROM LOWER LEFT) Russ Kusmertz grows animated reminiscing about the days when he pitched for Globe-Miami.

(BELOW) The Globe Bears team picture in 1929. Thornton Lee is standing, fourth from right. THORNTON LEE COLLECTION (BOTTOM) Among Lefty Salazar's personal collection of memorabilia is this baseball autographed by Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell.

But what Lee and his teammates also found were fiercely loyal fans who loved baseball. Arizona's Governor Rose Mofford, a native of Globe, remembers how the miners, still carrying their lunch buckets, would come straight from a shift change to the park. “It was always a special day in my life,” she smiles, “when my father would take me to a baseball game.” Mofford believes baseball played a strong

First Cactus League

role in bringing together the ethnically diverse populations of the mining towns. Lee confirms the "League of Nations" makeup of the Bears themselves: French, Italian, Mexican, Native American, Irish, Hawaiian, English, and German.

"The team was named after a live bear," he recalls. "Someone gave Mickey Shader, the manager, a cub, and he presented it to the club as a mascot. They put it in an enclosure on the road to Roosevelt. It went berserk one day, and they had to shoot it."

At Bisbee the manager was stubborn, hot-tempered "Hard Rock" Johnson. Once when thrown out of a game in Tucson by the umpires, he found a boy on a horse outside the ballpark, rented the horse, and returned to manage his team on horseback, "off the premises," from behind the outfield fence. It was in Tucson that Tony Boroja, one of the hometown Cowboys' outfielders, called time out to kill a snake with a bat.

More than anything, Thornton Lee remembers the summer heat in Arizona in the era before night games. "Our uniforms were made of heavy flannel," he says, "very baggy. Tony Freitas and I pitched a doubleheader in August in Phoenix, and both games went 13 innings. And the temperature that day was 118°."

By 1931 the Depression was beginning to take its toll on the Arizona economy and, in particular, on the copper industry. The Miami Miners ceased operations, as did the Phoenix Senators. Globe's Old Dominion Mine closed for good, while the Bears were to struggle through the 1931 season before disbanding. Teams from El Paso and Albuquerque joined with Tucson and Bisbee-Douglas to keep the league alive. The new four-team alignment changed its name to the Arizona-Texas League. Moving up to Class C, it survived only through July of the 1932 season. Not until 1937 did the Arizona-Texas League reappear, when play was resumed with the same four teams, but at Class D level. But a number of players from that earlier 1928-1932 period of the Arizona State and Arizona-Texas circuits went on to the major leagues. In addition to Lee, they included Phoenix and Globe pitcher Freitas (who by the end of his career had the greatest number of minor league pitching victories, with 340); Globe infielder Art Garibaldi (often listed as "Garry" in newspaper box scores); Globe outfielder Augie Galan; Tucson outfielder Vince DiMaggio; Sid Cohen of El Paso (who became both the last American League pitcher to strike out Babe Ruth and the last To give up a home run to Ruth); and Globe's Johnny Keane (who managed the St. Louis Cardinals to a world championship and later was manager of the New York Yankees).

Other players, such as Letch Quinn of the Miami Miners, would leave baseball and stay in Arizona. Quinn became a member of the Board of Supervisors of Gila County. Mesa pitcher Lefty Blackburn became a detective with the Mesa Police Department. Waldo Dicus, league secretary in the early years, returned to his native Jerome to coach high school sports, moved on to Bisbee, and later became superintendent of schools at Ajo.

"I was paid $75 a month. Meal money when the club was on the road was $1.50 a day. First I lived at the YMCA, and then I moved to Mrs. E. A. Pike's boardinghouse. In the heat of the summer, the players who stayed at Mrs. Pike's slept out in the backyard. The touring cars of earlier years were replaced by buses. "Tucson had an old Pickwick bus," Salazar recalls, "and we all took turns driving it." Often the bus stalled out in flooded road dips during the summer thunderstorm season. "We pushed that bus all over the place," he chuckles. "The 1938 season for the Arizona-Texas League," declared President R. E. Souers of Bisbee, "was one of the finest in its history." Every club, Souers proudly pointed out, was reported solvent. With farm-team affiliations being established with the Cardinals, Cubs, Yankees, and Reds, and with Tucson and Bisbee following the lead of El Paso and Albuquerque by offering night games in 1939, it seemed certain the league would soon expand and that its future was at last secure. But it was not to be. World War II would postpone the boom days of the Arizona-Texas League until 1947.

A postwar baseball boom it was. In 1947 the Arizona-Texas League moved up in status to Class C. Phoenix, now boasting a population of more than 75,000, returned to the league, joining Tucson, Albuquerque, and El Paso as the league's most (OPPOSITE PAGE) The late Billy Martin, who gained notoriety with the New York Yankees, got his start with the Phoenix Senators at the age of 19. UPI/BETTMANN NEWSPHOTOS (DIAGONALLY FROM LEFT) Bisbee resident Bob Henry remembers the night Martin got a bit off one of Henry's pitches, stole second, then stole third, and finally stole home.

prominent population centers. Juarez, Chihuahua, a hotbed of Mexican baseball enthusiasm, joined to give the league an international flavor. And to the joy of their loyal fans, Globe and Miami, represented by the Globe-Miami Browns, were back. So, too, were the rival Bisbee Yanks. Then a brash, confident third baseman for the Phoenix Senators, 19-year-old Alfred Manuel (Billy) Martin, came on the scene. Those who were there are still talking about it.

In Billy Martin, a 1980 biography of the late colorful player and manager, Gene Schoor writes: "Billy Martin's manager at Phoenix was Arky Biggs, a hell-for-leather ballplayer. 'Knock 'em down!' was his war cry, and that's the way his team played." Biggs' aggressive young third baseman came ready for battle. So also did a stolid Louisiana-born catcher for Bisbee named Clint (Scrap Iron) Courtney.

Early on, a feud developed between Martin and Courtney when the latter came into second base, according to Schoor, "with his spikes riding high, and cut up Arky's legs bad." Martin told Schoor that Courtney "almost cut off Biggs' legs." Arky Biggs' injuries were so severe that he did not play for the rest of the season. Martin moved over to replace Biggs at second. He would more than take up the fight for his injured manager.

(ABOVE) Lefty Salazar's old glove shows the battle scars of many seasons in the Arizona-Texas League. The glove not only served Salazar when he was pitching, but it also saw duty in the outfield. Occasionally Lefty played first base.

(BOTTOM, LEFT) Vince DiMaggio, once a Tucson outfielder, became one of a trio of major-leaguer brothers along with Joe (left) and Dom (right). UPI/BETTMANN NEWSPHOTOS "From then on," recalls longtime Bisbee resident Bob Henry, who pitched for Globe-Miami that year, "if Courtney ever got to second base there was a fight." Reportedly the two also fought it out, after a game, under the stands at Phoenix Municipal Stadium. Martin, says Henry, played and fought "with fire flying out of his eyes." Henry remembers a night in Globe when Martin, having heard enough heckling from one of Globe-Miami's most loyal and vocal fans, pulled the man from the stands. Enraged fans then came down after Martin. In an attempt to restore order, both teams took it on themselves to rescue the Phoenix second baseman.

"If his batting average was .392 that year, he must have hit .350 of that off me," says Henry, now in his 60s. The hard-throwing Henry well remembers the night Martin singled, stole second, then stole third, and

(BELOW AND RIGHT) Jimmy Cantu was a consistent .300 hitter during his eight seasons in the Arizona-Texas League. Cantu, who still plays in oldtimer games at the age of 70, has proud memories of the day be went three for three against future Hall of Fame pitcher Juan Marichal in an exhibition game. (OPPOSITE PAGE) Pitcher Don Larsen, who pitched the only perfect game in World Series history, played outfield for the Globe-Miami Bears after World War II. UPI/BETTMANN NEWSPHOTOSfinally stole home. That season Martin led the league in batting and runs batted in and was named the league's most valuable player. Martin and Courtney would soon play together and again become rivals in the American League.

Among other postwar players who would move up to the major leagues were a Bisbee and Globe-Miami teammate of Courtney's, Frank Lucchesi; El Paso's Joe DeMaestri; Bob Lillard of Phoenix; and an outfielder for Globe-Miami who later became a famous New York Yankee pitcher, Don Larsen.

Russ Kusmertz of Bisbee, now 66, was a pitcher for Globe-Miami and later for Bisbee-Douglas. The league "was a hitter's paradise," according to Kusmertz, "because of the altitude and dry air."

Jimmy Cantu, 70, of Douglas would agree. Cantu played his first professional season in 1943 with Jacksonville, Texas, of the East Texas League. In 1947 he joined the El Paso Texans. Known among his peers as a "player's player," Cantu made the Arizona-Texas League his own hitter's "If you hit a homer, fans would poke money through the fence," Wigman says, "and you'd make some good money." Many fans liked to bet during the games, right down to whether a pitch would be a ball or a strike. The wagering sometimes made bettors fickle supporters of the home team. "One time in Juarez,"

Wigman remembers, "after I hit a home run, the fans stuck pesos through the fence. I guess they'd bet I would. I looked over at the manager, and he gave me the nod, and I went around the outfield fence pulling out pesos." For one year, 1951, the league attempted an expansion, changing its name to the Southwest International League and adding teams in Tijuana, Mexicali, El Centro, Yuma, and Las Vegas. In 1952 the ArizonaTexas name was readopted, and for three years the roster of teams changed slightly each season. At the end of the 1954 season, the Arizona-Texas League closed down, this time for good. Air conditioning and television had arrived, two good reasons to stay out of the summer heat and be entertained at home. Players' salaries were increasing; so was the cost of transportation.

Russ Kusmertz, who had pitched for Springfield, Illinois, and Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1946 before reporting to GlobeMiami a year later, recalls that in those earlier days, "the Dodgers alone had something like 33 farm teams." But now, all across America, many of the lower minor leagues began to disappear. The trend has continued at the same time college baseball has flourished. The college game increasingly has become a training and proving ground for many future major leaguers. In Arizona strong competition has established a winning tradition. The University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Grand Canyon University, and five community colleges Phoenix, Glendale, Mesa, Yavapai, and Central Arizona-have all won national baseball titles.

When the Arizona-Texas League was no more, a number of its former players had already chosen to stay and raise their families here in Arizona. Others would return to make the state their home. Most have now retired, though some only recently. Lefty Salazar is still vitally interested in the sport he has loved all his life. He collects autographed baseballs for his grandson, and has obtained signatures of many of the game's greatest players.

Russ Kusmertz looks out at the ballpark in the Warren district of Bisbee and remarks with satisfaction, "This park has never changed."

Jimmy Cantu, still slender and fit despite heart surgery, continues to play in oldtimer baseball games. Although he never

40 May 1990

paradise for eight seasons as a consistent .300 hitter. A fine athlete who played professional soccer in the off-season, Cantu was admired too for his defensive skills as an outfielder. He also played for BisbeeDouglas and Juarez. He finished his career in Juarez in 1954, when he was 36 years old. He played 116 games during that year and batted .323.

From the end of the 1940s through the Korean War years, the copper industry prospered and attendance broke records throughout the league. While attendance would nearly double in Phoenix, from 55,000 in 1947 to more than 100,000 in 1950, the far smaller mining communities of Globe-Miami and Bisbee-Douglas were drawing about 50,000 to 60,000 enthusiastic fans a season.

O. C. (Ozzie) Wigman of Globe was a young pitcher assigned to the Globe-Miami Browns by the parent St. Louis Browns in the spring of 1948. Paid $325 a month, he earned an extra $25 to $50 a road trip driving one of the team station wagons. When not pitching, Wigman played left field or first base, but he quickly learned a homerun swing could prove another and easier way to supplement his salary. "After a made nine seasons in the major leagues. Like his father, he now lives in Tucson, where he is a field representative for the National Association, the governing body of minor league baseball. In 1928 a Phoenix newspaper reported on the large crowd that turned out to watch the Bisbee Bees battle the Phoenix Senators. The fans were also there to offer their good wishes and applause to a swift, hard-hitting Phoenix outfielder who was moving on maybe all the way to the big leagues. Yam Ornelas, reported The Arizona Republican, with "the biggest financial consideration ever given to an Arizona player," was going to Mobile, Alabama, of the Southern Association. Ornelas would never play in the major leagues, although he did become a scout for the Cleveland Indians. But his hopes typified the dream of every baseball player, and he exemplified the kind of promising young man fans will always root for. It was that way then, too, a long time ago in the first cactus league.

Jeb Rosebrook is a film and television writer who lives in Los Angeles and Scottsdale.

Photographer Jay Dusard is a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways.

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