Great Falls Electrics
The Great Falls Electrics, based in Great Falls, Montana, were the most successful franchise in the state's minor league history, winning five league championships across five decades. The name was in use from 1911 through 1913, again from 1916 through 1917, and then from 1948 through 1963, with titles in 1913, 1917, 1951, 1954 and 1961.
Great Falls was a charter member of the Union Association when the Class D circuit formed in 1911, alongside the Butte Miners, Helena Senators, Salt Lake City Skyscrapers, Boise Irrigators and Missoula. The club took the league title in 1913, then moved to the Northwestern League for 1916 and 1917 and won there as well before disbanding.
Professional baseball returned to Great Falls in 1948, when the city and Billings were added to a Class C circuit that had until then been confined to Idaho and Utah. For two seasons in 1949 and 1950 the club played as the Great Falls Selectrics, a name built from the Great Falls Breweries product Select and the older Electrics identity. The Electrics name returned in 1951 and stayed, apart from a single season in 1957 when the club took its parent club's name.
Great Falls was a Brooklyn and later Los Angeles Dodgers affiliate from 1952 through 1963, and the talent moving through reflected it. Oscar Sardinas hit .416 for the 1953 club, a full-season league record. Bobby Cox spent most of 1963 in Great Falls splitting time between second and third base, two decades before he began the managing career that took the Atlanta Braves to a World Series title and Cooperstown.
Baseball in Great Falls predates the Electrics by nearly twenty years. The Great Falls Smelter Cities were charter members of the 1892 Montana State League and folded that July with a 6-10 record. When the Anaconda Standard accused most of the league of ignoring its $200 monthly salary limit, Great Falls manager Freund answered that his club had exactly two men drawing pay and that the rest held jobs in town and played for whatever was in it. The papers called them the Cataract city nine, after the falls on the Missouri. Great Falls folded in July regardless, and the city fielded clubs again in 1900 and 1905. The franchise that followed the Electrics has operated continuously in the city since 1969 under a series of different names.
The Electrics name was in circulation in Great Falls a decade before a club ever wore it. In the spring of 1900 the state's papers debated what to call the city's team, weighing Electricians against Sheepherders on the grounds that Great Falls was the wool center of Montana. The Anaconda Standard complained that Electricians was a mouthful and nearly impossible to say without pulling a face, but conceded that its local meaning outweighed the awkwardness. The 1900 club ended up with neither name. The shorter form arrived in 1911 and stayed for half a century.
