Globe Bears

The Globe Bears were Globe, Arizona's professional baseball club from 1929 to 1931, a mining-town team in Arizona's first league in organized baseball that was named for an actual bear. Player-manager Mickey Shader was given an orphaned bear cub, the club took the name, and the cub was kept in an enclosure outside town.

Shader recruited most of his roster from California, and the players called themselves the League of Nations. Four members of the 1929 team reached the majors: pitchers Thornton Lee and Tony Freitas, infielder Art Garibaldi and Henry Oana, known as Prince Oana, who led the league with 127 hits. Lee later made an All-Star team with the White Sox and Freitas won 340 games in the minors, a record for a pitcher who never settled in the big leagues. The mining company added $100 a month to Lee's $250 salary to keep him.

Globe traveled to games in a single Cadillac with the equipment strapped to the sides, and miners came straight from shift change to School Hill Park with their lunch buckets. The 1929 club finished third at 48-42. In 1930 the Bears tied Bisbee at three games apiece for the championship, then refused to make the trip to Bisbee for the deciding game, and the title was awarded to the Bees.

The Old Dominion Mine closed during the 1931 season, the Bears finished 49-81 and the club disbanded. Globe and Miami later shared a team, the Browns, that won back-to-back titles in 1947 and 1948.

Arizona's first league in organized baseball opened in 1928 as a Class D circuit with four clubs, in Bisbee, Miami, Phoenix and Tucson. It became the Arizona-Texas League in 1931 and the Arizona-Mexico League in 1955, and ran, with gaps, through 1958, eventually reaching into Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and northern Mexico.