Bisbee-Douglas Copper Kings

The Bisbee-Douglas Copper Kings were the professional baseball club shared by Bisbee and Douglas, Arizona from 1949 to 1955, two copper towns on the Mexican border that split their home games. The team moved to Douglas alone in 1956 and played there through 1958, the final season of the Class C Arizona-Mexico League.

The Copper Kings grew out of the Bisbee Yanks of 1947 and the Bisbee-Douglas Miners of 1948, and took a name that had belonged to a Bisbee mining company team at the turn of the century. The club was a Brooklyn Dodgers affiliate in 1950 and 1951 and a Pittsburgh Pirates affiliate from 1956 to 1958. First baseman Gene Clough hit 37 home runs in 1949 and George Arent hit 32 in 1956, but the shared club never finished above .500 in its seven seasons.

Douglas changed that. The 1956 club finished second, and in 1958 the Copper Kings won the championship at 68-52 under pitcher-manager Bob Clear. On August 19, 1958, in a game played at Ciudad Delicias against Chihuahua, all nine Douglas starters hit a home run in a 22-8 win, Clear included, a feat no other professional team is known to have matched. The game was called after eight innings for darkness in front of 614 people.

The league folded by telegram the following March, and professional baseball never returned to either town. Bisbee's Warren Ballpark, where the Copper Kings played their Bisbee dates, opened in 1909 and still stands.

Arizona's first league in organized baseball opened in 1928 as a Class D circuit with four clubs, in Bisbee, Miami, Phoenix and Tucson. It became the Arizona-Texas League in 1931 and the Arizona-Mexico League in 1955, and ran, with gaps, through 1958, eventually reaching into Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and northern Mexico.