Miami Hustlers

The Miami Hustlers of Miami, Florida arrived in 1927, part of their league's push down the coast into a south Florida that was picking itself up after the great hurricane of 1926 had punctured the land boom. The name fit the city's reputation: Miami in the 1920s was a town of promoters, speculators, and fast talkers, and nobody there would have taken "Hustlers" as an insult.

The Hustlers were good immediately, reaching the championship finals in their first season before losing to Orlando 4 games to 1. They returned for 1928, but the league itself went dark after that season and did not reorganize until 1936, by which point Miami's baseball future lay elsewhere. The Hustlers remain the city's only team from the 1920s vintage era.

The Hustlers' league began play in 1919 as a Class D circuit of six teams clustered across central Florida, tracing what would later become the I-4 corridor decades before the interstate existed. The circuit ran through 1928, went dark during the Depression, returned in 1936, paused again for World War II, and resumed in 1946. Unlike most minor leagues of the era, it never truly died; the same circuit still operates across Florida today.

In the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, teams existed in thousands of small towns across the United States, as Americans looked for recreational activities and entertainment in the era before TV.