Alameda Encinals

The Alameda Encinals, based in the island city of Alameda, California, played the 1908 season in the outlaw California League, succeeding the Alameda Grays as the city's entry in the circuit. The name is one of the era's hidden gems: encinal is Spanish for a grove of coast live oaks, the trees that covered the island before development, and the name survives all over Alameda today in its Encinal district, Encinal Avenue, and Encinal High School. Fittingly, Alameda itself is a tree word too, Spanish for a poplar-lined promenade, making the Encinals perhaps the only team ever named twice over for its town's trees.

Alameda was one of the smallest cities in a league dominated by San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento, and the Encinals' single season closed out the island's brief run in professional baseball, two seasons under two names.

In the first half of the 1900s, professional baseball reached into towns of every size across America, with leagues rising and folding year to year as cities looked for entertainment in the era before television. The early California League circuits were among the most colorful of these, running independent of the baseball establishment until the Pacific Coast League absorbed the region's best markets.