Everything about The Decatur Commodores totally explained
The
Decatur Commodores were a professional
minor league baseball team based in
Decatur, Illinois. They played, with sporadic interruptions, from
1900 to
1974 in a variety of minor leagues, but spent the majority of their existence in the
Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League (the "Three-I" League), later joining the
Mississippi-Ohio Valley League (
1952 to
1955) and the
Midwest League (
1956 to
1974). While they spent most of their years as an independent without formal
major league baseball team affiliation, their primary affiliations were with the
St. Louis Cardinals and later the
San Francisco Giants, with isolated affiliations with the
Detroit Tigers,
Chicago Cubs and
Philadelphia Phillies. They played home games at
Fans Field, the 5,200-seat grandstand of which was demolished when the team moved to
Wausau, Wisconsin in
1974. The field is still in use as a softball field.
The nickname Commodores refers to
Stephen Decatur, for whom the city is named. The team was often called the "Commies" for short, from a time before that became a slang term for "
Communist". In their final years, they wore hand-me-down Giants uniforms, although still called the "Commodores", leading some fans to call them the "Commodore Giants".
The club is the primary ancestor of today's
Kane County Cougars.
Playoffs
Notable Former Players
Carl Hubbell - 1927
Bob Clear - 1947
Johnny Lucadello - 1954
Gary Matthews- 1969
Bob Knepper
James Freeman, Negro League ballplayer - 1952-1953
Memorable Games
On August 18, 1960, 18 year old, left handed pitcher Bob Sprout of the Commodores pitched a no hitter against the Waterloo Hawks. In that game, Sprout struck out 22 hitters; which stands as the MWL single-game strikeout record. The Commies won by a 3-0 score.
See ONE GLORIOUS SEASON , the website for writer Steve Chicoine
for an article on the 1952 Decatur Commodore season, which broke the color barrier.
ONE GLORIOUS SEASON: How Baseball helped to integrate Decatur, Illinois
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Volume 96, number 1, Spring 2003, pages 80-97
In Fiction
The Commodores appear in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, an alternate history in which aliens invade Earth in 1942 and the Second World War turns into an interplanetary war. Members of the team are on a train which is attacked by the aliens at the beginning of the invasion. One ball player is kidnapped by the invaders and is eventually taken by them to China, while another player and the team's manager escape and join the forces fighting the invasion. A considerable part of the series is described from these three characters' points of view, in which their baseball background plays a significant role in a number of ways.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Decatur Commodores'.
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