Martinsville Manufacturers

The Martinsville Manufacturers took their name from the city's textile mills, which produced towels for much of the early twentieth century. The team joined the Class D Bi-State League at its founding in 1934, a circuit built around mill towns along the North Carolina-Virginia border. In that inaugural season, player-manager Jimmy Sanders hit .423, the highest batting average in all of minor league baseball that year, though Martinsville lost the championship series to the Danville-Schoolfield Leafs.

Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter played his first professional season with Martinsville in 1935, going on to a nineteen-year career with the Cardinals and Yankees that included ten All-Star selections and a World Series championship. The Manufacturers became a St. Louis Cardinals affiliate later in the decade before switching to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1940, the same year they won their only Bi-State League championship.

The Manufacturers played their final season in 1941, finishing second despite batting champion Albert Behrends hitting .378 and teammate Tom Burnette leading the league with 28 home runs and 114 RBI. The Bi-State League folded the following year and was succeeded after World War II by the Carolina League, where a new Martinsville franchise, the Athletics, won the 1948 Carolina League title with Hall of Famer Heinie Manush managing in 1945.

The Manufacturers and the Athletics both played at the same Martinsville ballpark, English Field, which still hosts baseball today as Hooker Field. This design's mascot draws on the towel-and-textile identity of Martinsville's mills, representing the Manufacturers through the product that built the town rather than through a generic occupational figure.