Boise Fruit Pickers

The Boise Fruit Pickers, based in Boise, Idaho, were the first professional baseball team the city ever fielded. They played the 1904 season in the Class B Pacific National League at Riverside Park, at 10th and Miller, and finished the year in first place.

There was no championship series to settle the pennant, so the Fruit Pickers went into the record books as a first-place club without a title to show for it. The franchise came back in 1905 under a new name, the Boise Infants, and finished first again. Between the two seasons Boise took more first-place finishes than any other club in the league's short life.

The Pacific National League itself lasted only three years, from 1903 to 1905. It grew out of an older Pacific Northwest circuit and spent its entire existence fighting a rival new league on the coast for players and territory. It folded permanently on June 20, 1905, when the Salt Lake City Fruit Pickers disbanded, and was expelled from the National Association the following February.

Two clubs in that league carried the Fruit Pickers name, Boise and Salt Lake City, in a stretch of country where irrigation projects had turned high desert into orchard land inside a generation. In the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, teams existed in thousands of small towns across the United States, as Americans looked for recreational activities and entertainment in the era before TV.