Hutchinson Wheatshockers

The Hutchinson Wheatshockers took their name from the harvest practice of stacking cut wheat into upright bundles called shocks to dry in the field, fitting for Hutchinson, Kansas, the city at the heart of the wheat belt. The Wheatshockers' Western League run was brief, eventful, and never once ended a season where it started.

The name arrived mid-season in 1917, when the St. Joseph franchise relocated to Hutchinson on July 24. The new Wheatshockers went 32-24 the rest of the way under a succession of three managers, including Babe Adams, the Pittsburgh Pirates' 1909 World Series hero, then serving out a mid-career exile in the minors before returning to Pittsburgh the following year. Hutchinson won the league's second-half title, swept Joplin in the playoff, and lost the finals to Des Moines four games to two.

The 1918 season went stranger still. The Wheatshockers started 14-19, and on June 2 the franchise moved to Oklahoma City, while on the very same day the Topeka franchise moved into Hutchinson and became the Salt Packers, a same-day team swap with few parallels in baseball history. A month later the federal "work or fight" order folded the entire league anyway.

The Wheatshockers name carried on in Class C ball through the 1920s and early 1930s, then made one final Western League appearance in 1933, which ended true to form: the franchise relocated mid-season to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where it finished the year as the Broncs.

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.