Vintage Arizona Shirts: Defunct Arizona Baseball Teams

Arizona's professional baseball history belongs to its mining camps as much as its cities. When the state's first league in organized baseball opened in 1928, a Class D circuit with four clubs, two of them were Phoenix and Tucson and the other two were the copper towns of Bisbee and Miami. Globe and Mesa joined the next year. The circuit became the Arizona-Texas League in 1931 and the Arizona-Mexico League in 1955, and ran, with gaps, through 1958, reaching into Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and northern Mexico before it folded by telegram the following spring.

The stories are as rough as the ballfields. Globe named its team for an orphaned bear cub and traveled to road games in a single Cadillac with the equipment strapped to the sides. The deciding game of the 1929 season, Bisbee at Miami, was still going at nightfall when Bisbee rallied in the dark to go ahead and the crowd came onto the field; no champion was ever named, and Miami put up a lighted sign on the highway declaring itself champion anyway. Tucson drove a 19-year-old Vince DiMaggio through downtown on the back of a truck to sell tickets for its first night game in 1932. In Phoenix, a 19-year-old Billy Martin hit .392 with 174 runs batted in for the 1947 Senators, and in 1958 all nine Douglas Copper Kings starters homered in a single game. Bisbee's Warren Ballpark, opened in 1909, still stands. Our vintage Arizona shirts honor these defunct clubs with original designs grounded in real research.

Every team below links to its own collection, where you can read the full history and shop shirts, hoodies, and crewnecks for that club. Find your hometown team, or the one your grandfather used to talk about.