Clearwater Pelicans

The Clearwater Pelicans of Clearwater, Florida existed for half a season. Midway through the 1924 campaign, the Daytona Beach Islanders franchise packed up and relocated across the state to Clearwater, finishing the year under the Pelicans name in what was by then a Class C circuit.

The Pelicans did not return in 1925, and Clearwater went six decades without a team of its own. The city's baseball identity instead grew around spring training, eventually becoming the longtime February home of the Philadelphia Phillies, but the Pelicans remain the only professional team ever to carry Clearwater's name in the vintage era.

The Pelicans' 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.

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.