Bradenton Growers

The Bradenton Growers of Bradenton, Florida were charter members of central Florida's new professional league in 1919, and they hosted the first game in league history, welcoming Tampa to town on July 1, 1919. The Growers name honored the citrus and vegetable farms that drove the local economy, and the club wore green and white to match.

The team was founded and owned by Robert M. Beall Sr., the same man who founded the Bealls department store chain that Floridians still shop at today. The Growers played at Ninth Street Park before moving in 1923 into the newly built City Park, the ballpark that later became McKechnie Field, longtime spring training home of the Pittsburgh Pirates and one of the oldest ballparks still in use in America.

Bradenton fielded the Growers in 1919-20, 1923-24, and 1926, with pitcher Logan Drake moving on from the Growers to relief work for the Cleveland Indians in the early 1920s. Professional baseball returned to town decades later, and Bradenton remains a baseball city to this day.

The Growers' league began play in 1919 as a Class D circuit of six teams clustered across central Florida, tracing what would later become the I-4 corridor decades before the interstate existed. The circuit ran through 1928, went dark during the Depression, returned in 1936, paused again for World War II, and resumed in 1946. Unlike most minor leagues of the era, it never truly died; the same circuit still operates across Florida today.