Magic Valley Cowboys

The Magic Valley Cowboys, based in Twin Falls, Idaho, played 17 seasons between 1952 and 1971 and are the longest-running professional baseball team the city has ever had. The club took its name from the Magic Valley, the irrigated stretch of the Snake River Plain that Twin Falls anchors, rather than from the city itself.

The 1955 season is the one worth remembering. The Cowboys went 64-67 as a Chicago Cubs affiliate, finished fourth, and won the championship anyway. It remains the only title in the Magic Valley era. The best regular-season club came eight years later, when the 1963 team went 84-44 and finished first, then lost in the opening round of the playoffs.

The club went dark after 1958 without going away. Twin Falls reached an agreement for the city to maintain the ballpark through 1959 against a possible return in 1960, and professional baseball came back in 1961 with a Philadelphia affiliation. Small towns usually lost teams for good; keeping the grass cut for two years on the chance of one coming back is the rarer outcome.

Twin Falls got a look at one of the great hitters of the following generation in 1961, when a 19-year-old second baseman named Richie Allen spent the season there as a Philadelphia farmhand. He is better known now as Dick Allen, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2025.

Home was Jaycee Field, in the northeast corner of Harmon Park. The Twin Falls Junior Chamber of Commerce bought twenty acres next to the original four-acre park in 1938 and installed a diamond and bleachers in time for the 1939 season, which is where the field got its name.

The Cowboys name in Twin Falls predates the Magic Valley era. The Twin Falls Cowboys played from 1939 through 1942 and again from 1946 through 1951, winning the league's inaugural championship in 1939 and taking two more in 1947 and 1948 as a New York Yankees affiliate. Wally Berger, a four-time major league All-Star, managed the 1950 club to a 76-50 record.