Aberdeen Pheasants
The Aberdeen Pheasants, based in Aberdeen, South Dakota, played 26 seasons from 1946 through 1971, winning the regular season pennant in 1947 and 1964 and the playoff title in 1949 and 1961. The club came into being when the circuit restarted after World War II and invited Aberdeen in to bring the membership up to eight teams. Aberdeen signed a working agreement with the St. Louis Browns that first year, and the arrangement simply carried over when the Browns became the Baltimore Orioles in 1953. A local contest picked the nickname, an obvious choice in a state where ring-necked pheasant hunting draws visitors from across the country.
The Pheasants were community owned, unusual for the era, and drew more than two thousand people to their first opening day. The 1947 club won the pennant but lost the playoff final to the Sioux Falls Canaries in six games, a series that drew 8,901 fans. Two years later Aberdeen turned it around. After finishing one game behind Eau Claire, the Pheasants won the 1949 playoffs over the Bears behind Bob Turley, who went on to win the 1958 Cy Young Award with the New York Yankees. Player-manager Irv Hall took the league batting title that season while playing second base.
The 1961 club followed the same script, finishing second to Duluth-Superior after leading most of the season and then sweeping St. Cloud in two games for the playoff title. The clincher ended 4-3 in ten innings when Don Branson scored from first on a two-out double by Phil Barth.
The 1964 season was the best of them. On June 8 the parent Orioles came to Aberdeen for an exhibition game against a roster that included Jim Palmer, Lou Piniella, Mark Belanger, Andy Etchebarren and Eddie Watt. Aberdeen came in at 31-9 and leading the league; the Orioles were 31-17 and half a game out of first in the American League. The pitching carried the summer: Dave Leonhard went 14-4, Watt 14-1, Tommy Fisher 15-6, Mike Davidson 11-4 and Palmer 11-3. The Pheasants clinched the pennant on August 16, pushed the final margin to twelve and a half games, and Belanger was named the league's rookie of the year.
The players who came through remembered the place for its distances more than its ballpark. A night game in Winnipeg meant boarding the bus after midnight, riding twelve hours and playing a doubleheader in Duluth the next afternoon. Earl Weaver, who managed in Aberdeen in 1959 before his Hall of Fame run in Baltimore, recalled that on some drives "the bus would hit 50 pheasants in the first hour." When the league folded after Sioux Falls and Duluth declined to field teams for 1972, the Baltimore press described the 27-year Aberdeen association, dating to the Browns, as the longest between a major league club and a farm team in baseball history.
Aberdeen had earlier professional teams under other names. The Aberdeen Boosters were charter members of the Class D South Dakota League in 1920, and the Aberdeen Grays played in the Dakota League, where a 20-year-old Al Simmons led the circuit with 144 hits in 1922 on his way to the Hall of Fame. A later, unrelated Aberdeen Pheasants club played three seasons in the independent Prairie League in the 1990s.
