Ogden Spikers

The Ogden Spikers, based in Ogden, Utah, existed for exactly one season, 1974, and were assembled out of whatever players six different major league organizations were willing to send. The name is a nod to the golden spike driven at Promontory Summit in 1869, about 60 miles northwest of the city, which made Ogden the junction town of the transcontinental railroad.

The Spikers were what was left of a very good club. The franchise had arrived in Ogden in 1966 from Pocatello and spent eight seasons as a Los Angeles affiliate, winning the league championship in each of its first four years from 1966 through 1969. Tommy Lasorda managed the first three of those title teams, two decades before he took the Dodgers to a World Series and Cooperstown.

When the parent club pulled out after the 1973 season, Ogden had no organization behind it. The 1974 team played as a co-op, a shared roster drawn from six systems at once, which is generally what happens to a rookie-level club right before it stops existing.

It stopped existing after that season. The franchise moved to Lethbridge, Alberta for 1975, where a 20-year-old outfielder named Andre Dawson led the league in hits, total bases and home runs on his way to the Hall of Fame. It stayed in Canada for nine years, then came back across the border to Pocatello in 1984, the city it had left eighteen years earlier.

Professional baseball returned to Ogden in 1994 and has been there since.