Ocala Yearlings

The Ocala Yearlings of Ocala, Florida played two seasons, 1940 and 1941, at Gerig Field, a ballpark built in 1936 with Works Progress Administration funding. The name looked forward as much as backward: a yearling is a young racehorse, and Ocala's Marion County was on its way to becoming one of the great thoroughbred breeding regions in the world.

The baseball didn't match the name's promise. The Yearlings finished seventh in both of their seasons, going 57-82 in 1940 and 49-78 in 1941, cycling through four managers in two years. When the league shut down for World War II after the 1941 season, the Yearlings never came back.

The Yearlings' 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.