Klamath Falls Gems
The Klamath Falls Gems played in Klamath Falls, Oregon, from 1948 through 1951 and were the Far West League's most successful club: a Philadelphia Phillies affiliate every season, the only team with a winning record in all four years, three trips to the playoff final, the 1950 pennant at 87-52 and a 3-0 sweep of Redding in the 1951 final.
The club was nearly the Pioneers. In January 1948 Klamath Baseball Inc. ran a public naming contest through the Herald and News and radio station KFLW, and at a hot stove banquet at the Willard Hotel on January 28 three local judges announced the winner: Pioneers, suggested by Howard Dunn, who collected $100. A week later the board dropped the name "for obvious reasons." Backers of the town's semi-pro Sunday club had quietly incorporated as Klamath Pioneers, Inc. twelve days before the banquet. In mid-February the board settled on Gems instead, a play on the Netted Gem potatoes grown across the Klamath country and a hope that the team would be a jewel of the league.
The same banquet introduced the first player and manager, Joe Gantenbein, a Philadelphia Athletics infielder in 1939 and 1940, in front of some 200 fans and guests including Bill Bevens, who three months earlier had lost a World Series no-hitter for the Yankees with two out in the ninth. Gantenbein led the 1948 club to a 67-58 record and a seven-game loss to Santa Rosa in the final. Hub Kittle ran the next two teams and in 1950 also went 10-0 on the mound; he later coached pitchers for the 1982 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals, and in 1980, at 63, started a game for Springfield. Player-manager Bill DeCarlo hit .335 with 13 home runs for the 1951 champions.
Home was Gem Stadium, an all-wood grandstand drawn up by architect Sheldon Brumbaugh and paid for out of a roughly $60,000 budget for the park, lights, uniforms and a team bus, about half of it raised by selling stock to local residents. The Gems led the league in attendance in three of four seasons, peaking at 62,078 in 1950, and the park still stands today as Kiger Stadium.
Gus Triandos played catcher and first base for the 1950 pennant winners and hit .347 with a league-leading 183 hits; with Baltimore he became a three-time American League All-Star and caught Hoyt Wilhelm's 1958 no-hitter. Niles Jordan went 19-7 for the 1949 club before pitching for the Phillies, Andy Sierra went 22-9 with a league-leading 258 strikeouts in 1950, and Bob Bowman played right field in Philadelphia from 1955 to 1959. A collegiate summer club revived the Gems name from 2011 to 2018.
The Far West League was a Class D circuit that ran from 1948 through 1951 with clubs in California, Nevada and Oregon, eight teams for its first three seasons and six in its last. It disbanded in January 1952 after Pittsburg, Redding and Medford withdrew, with the Korean War draft thinning the supply of young players.
