Lake Charles Skippers

The Lake Charles Skippers, based in Lake Charles, Louisiana, won the 1938 Evangeline League championship, defeating the Abbeville Athletics four games to three in the finals as a Detroit Tigers affiliate. The team drew some of the league's strongest attendance figures during their run, with Lake Charles consistently at or near the top in home crowds. The city's position on Calcasieu Lake and along the Intracoastal Waterway gave the Skippers name a fitting nautical flavor.

Lake Charles had been part of the circuit nearly from the start: the 1934 Lake Charles Explorers were among the founding six franchises, though fire destroyed Legion Field's grandstand that first season and forced a mid-year relocation to Jeanerette. Once rebuilt, the Skippers formed in 1935 and ran through the 1942 season, when the league folded for the war on May 30. The Skippers were Cincinnati Reds affiliates in 1935, Detroit Tigers affiliates in 1937 and 1938, and Chicago Cubs affiliates in 1941.

Minor league baseball returned to Lake Charles after more than a decade away in 1954, when the Lakers joined from the Gulf Coast League. In 1956, the franchise, by then renamed the Giants, carried future Hall of Famer Felipe Alou on its roster, one of the handful of Black players briefly assigned to Evangeline League clubs before the league voted to ban integration outright that same season.

The Evangeline League was a Class D minor league (Class C from 1949) that operated primarily in southern and central Louisiana from 1934 through 1957, with a wartime pause from 1943 through 1945. Named for the Acadian folk heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 epic poem, the league was nicknamed the "Pepper Sauce League" or the "Tabasco Circuit" by fans and sportswriters, a nod to the Cajun country setting and the volatile brand of baseball played there.