Idaho Falls Russets

The Idaho Falls Russets, based in Idaho Falls, Idaho, played 19 seasons between 1940 and 1961 and began the longest continuous run of one city in one league in professional baseball history. They took their place in 1940 by inheriting the franchise that had spent the previous season in Lewiston, and the city has never given it back.

The Russets opened on April 26, 1940 with a 10-4 loss at Pocatello and closed on September 4, 1961 with a doubleheader sweep at Boise. In between they won a league championship in 1952 behind pitcher Ken Kimball, who won 26 games that year. The 1960 club posted the best regular-season record in the league and then lost the title in the playoffs to Boise.

A skinny 18-year-old second baseman named Billy Martin played for Idaho Falls in 1946, six years before he reached the New York Yankees and decades before the managing career that made him one of the most combustible figures in the sport. The Russets were a Yankees farm club in their first two seasons and cycled through Brooklyn, New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago affiliations after the war.

Home was Highland Park, where a covered wooden grandstand went up in 1940 and stood until fire destroyed it in the mid-1970s. Every professional team in the city's history has played on that same site.

Idaho Falls had a club before the Russets. The Idaho Falls Spuds played in the Class C Utah-Idaho League from 1926 through 1928, winning back-to-back championships in 1926 and 1927 at that same Highland Park diamond. When the Yankees returned as the parent club in 1962 the Russets name was retired in favor of the parent's.