Boise Pilots
The Boise Pilots, based in Boise, Idaho, played eleven seasons of Class C baseball between 1939 and 1954 as one of the six charter members of a new circuit covering Idaho and Utah. They were unaffiliated with any major league organization for their entire run, which by the 1950s made them an increasingly rare thing in the minor leagues.
The Pilots came agonizingly close three years running. Boise reached the league finals in 1940, in 1941 and again in 1942, and lost all three. The league then shut down for the duration of World War II, and when the Pilots returned in 1946 they never got back to a final.
The name came out of a public contest and it was about airplanes. The club opened entries on a Tuesday in February 1939 and closed them the following Monday evening, drawing nearly 300 suggestions, roughly two thirds of them from the country around Boise rather than the city itself. The winner was Parke P. Gavin of 100 Warm Springs Avenue, who took home a season pass good at any home game. His written case was that Boise had the largest airport in America, that it would eventually bring the airplane industry and its payrolls to the city, and that this team would pilot Boise back to baseball.
Owner-president Hadyn Walker liked the timing as much as the name, pointing to the dedication of the new airport and the arrival of the Mainliners in Boise. He called it short, colorful and tied to the locality. What Boise did not have that February was anywhere to play. League officials rated it the least prepared club of the six, and Walker would say only that a site had been selected and could not yet be named.
The answer was Airway Park, which opened with the club that spring a few blocks east of the municipal airport, on ground that is now the Boise State University campus. It was renamed Joe Devine Airway Park in 1952 for the New York Yankees scout who had signed players out of the region for decades.
The Pilots name went away and came back. Boise operated as a Yankees affiliate under a different name in 1952 and 1953, returned to the Pilots identity for a single season in 1954, and then spent nine years as a Milwaukee affiliate before the city lost professional baseball after 1963.
Boise's baseball history runs back well before the Pilots. The Boise Fruit Pickers arrived in 1904, the Boise Infants followed in 1905, and the Boise Irrigators played in three different leagues between 1909 and 1914. The Boise Senators had a single season in the Utah-Idaho League in 1928.
