Denver Grizzlies
Denver, Colorado's Western League club won the league title in 1900 under the Bears name, then became the Denver Grizzlies in 1901, with both names riding the national fame of Theodore Roosevelt. For a decade the Grizzlies were good but never quite first, twice finishing two games out of the pennant. The best player to pass through in those years was Babe Adams, who led the league in strikeouts in 1907, then went on to win three games for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1909 World Series as a rookie.
The wait ended emphatically. The 1911 Grizzlies, under manager Jack Hendricks, went 111-54 and finished eighteen games ahead of the second-place St. Joseph Drummers, a season later recognized on the National Association's list of the 100 greatest minor league teams of all time. Buck O'Brien was the league's top pitcher, and outfielder Harry Cassidy hit .333. That fall the Grizzlies took on the Minneapolis Millers, champions of the higher-classification American Association, and upset them four games to one. The money didn't match the glory: after expenses, each Denver player's share of the series came to $131.55, roughly $4,400 in today's dollars.
Denver repeated as champions in 1912 at 99-63 behind Johnny Beall's league-leading 18 home runs, then changed the name back to the Bears for 1913 and won a third straight pennant under the restored name. The franchise line ran in the Western League into the 1930s and again after the war, eventually playing at the stadium that grew into Mile High. The Grizzlies name itself got one brief modern revival, borrowed by a Denver minor league hockey team for a single season in the 1990s.
The Western League was a Class A circuit for most of its life, operating from 1900 through 1937 and again from 1947 through 1958, fielding teams across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states, including Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, and later Texas and New Mexico. For its first decade it stood just one step below the major leagues. An earlier league of the same name, which ran from 1885 to 1899, renamed itself the American League in 1900 and lives on today as one half of Major League Baseball.
