Fargo-Moorhead Graingrowers
The Fargo-Moorhead Graingrowers, based in Fargo, North Dakota, in partnership with neighboring Moorhead, Minnesota, played from 1914 through 1917 and won championships in 1915 and 1917 plus a second-half pennant in 1916. The nickname pointed at the industry that built both cities; the Fargo-Moorhead visitors center today occupies a former grain elevator.
The 1915 title came on the arm of a pitching staff with three twenty-game winners. Ralph Bell went 22-13 to lead the league in wins, George Dumont went 20-10, and Roy Patterson went 21-5 for the best winning percentage in the circuit at age 38. Patterson had pitched for the Chicago White Sox from 1901 to 1907 and was the winning pitcher in the first American League game ever played. Fargo-Moorhead signed him only after Winnipeg fired him on July 8; the club was 12 games out at the time and went 42-25 the rest of the way to finish 74-49.
Manager Bob Unglaub, who had run the Boston Red Sox as player-manager in 1907, led the club from 1914 through 1916 and did not live to see the last title. Unglaub held an engineering degree from Maryland and worked offseasons in the Pennsylvania Railroad shops in Baltimore. On November 29, 1916, he was supervising work on a locomotive when he was crushed and killed at age 36.
His replacement was Denny Sullivan, his teammate on the 1907 and 1908 Red Sox and by then a practicing physician. Sullivan turned down a job with the Hannibal Mules because Fargo offered a better opening for his medical practice. He took the club to 36-16 and first place in 1917, at which point the league folded in early July with the country at war. It was Sullivan's last season in professional baseball.
Fargo baseball ran deeper than the Graingrowers. A Fargo club played from 1902 through 1906 and again in 1908, the Fargo Athletics played the 1922 Dakota League season, and the Fargo-Moorhead Twins picked up in 1933. All of it postdates the 1897 Fargo Divorcees and Moorhead Barmaids, the first professional clubs in either city. The Graingrowers played at Island Park, which was platted in 1877 as a gift from the Northern Pacific Railway and is still a public park today.
