Anniston Rams
The Anniston Rams played in Anniston, Alabama, in the Class B Southeastern League from 1938 through 1942 and again from 1946 through 1950, and they won the league championship in 1946.
The nickname came out of the foundries. Anniston was built on iron, and its pipe shops and foundries ran on the labor of men who packed sand into casting molds using a heavy wooden tool called a rammer. The ballclub took its name from the tool, not from the animal, which makes it one of the few team names in the South drawn directly from the motion of a particular job.
The club ran through three major league affiliations in its first stretch, working with the Chicago White Sox in 1938 and 1939, the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1940, and the Pittsburgh Pirates in the championship season of 1946. Frank Papish was the only 20-game winner the Rams ever had. Home games were played at Johnston Field.
For most of its life the team was held together by one man. Loy Gunter ran a clothing and jewelry store in Anniston and began as a sponsor before being elected president of the Anniston Baseball Corporation in February 1941. He was reportedly out nearly four thousand dollars of his own money that year covering payroll gaps, and he stayed the club's owner and public face through 1949. The league had taken the franchise over once already, in 1940, when attendance and finances gave out, and a community fundraising drive brought it back.
The second time, nobody came. Gunter stepped away after 1949 and refused any involvement in a 1950 team. Ownership reverted to a group, the money ran out partway through the season, and the franchise went back to the Southeastern League, which operated it as an orphan club for two weeks. Having no home to play in, the team was made to play every remaining game on the road. The league shut it down for good on July 25, 1950.
The deepest research on this club belongs to Phillip Tutor, whose blog The Unforgettable & Irrelevant Anniston Rams has been documenting the Rams for years ahead of a forthcoming book. Among the finds there: reports that Hall of Famer Red Schoendienst once wore a Rams uniform, and that Dick Porter managed the club. We have not independently confirmed either, and the credit for turning them up is his.
The Southeastern League was a Class B circuit built on the small industrial cities of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.
