Johnstown Johnnies
The Johnstown Johnnies played in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and were the most durable franchise in the Middle Atlantic League, representing the city in 19 of the league's 24 seasons. Johnstown had been fielding professional teams since 1883, cycling through names that included the Pirates, the Terrors, and, in 1898, the Mormans, before settling on Johnnies in 1904.
The Johnnies won the Middle Atlantic League in its inaugural 1925 season and repeated in 1926, taking the playoff from Fairmont four games to two. A third title followed in 1930. From 1926 the club played at Point Stadium, built at the confluence of the Stony Creek and Little Conemaugh rivers, the same junction that had put the city underwater in the 1889 flood.
Before the Middle Atlantic League existed, the Johnnies spent 1905 through 1912 in the Class B Tri-State League. They left the Middle Atlantic League for the Pennsylvania State Association from 1939 through 1942, then returned for the league's postwar run from 1946 through 1950. Working agreements over those years ran through the St. Louis Browns, the Philadelphia Phillies, and most durably the Brooklyn Dodgers, who supplied Johnstown from 1940 through 1942 and again from 1946 through 1949.
The club's own 1940s program art put a face to the name. The cover badge placed a profile portrait of Joseph Johns, the city's founder, at its center, in tricorn hat and braided queue, flanked by crossed bats and ringed by the team name, tying the Johnnies to the man Johnstown itself is named for. Our design is based on that actual program artwork.
Johnstown kept playing after the Middle Atlantic League folded, joining the Class A Eastern League in 1955 and 1956 and returning for one more season in 1961 as the Red Sox. The Johnnies name was revived by an unaffiliated independent-league club decades later.
The Middle Atlantic League was a Class C circuit that ran from 1925 through 1951, pausing for three wartime seasons, with teams drawn mostly from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Elmer M. Daily served as its president for all but the first year.
