Palatka Azaleas

The Palatka Azaleas of Palatka, Florida took their name from the flowers that made the town famous, and their ballpark followed suit: the Azaleas played at the Azalea Bowl at Forrester Field, a ballpark now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Babe Ruth himself ran baseball clinics on that field in the late 1930s.

The Azaleas played 1936 to 1939 and again from 1946 to 1953, cycling through big league affiliations with the Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees in the early years. The franchise's peak came in 1952, when Palatka won the league championship, finishing ahead of a strong Jacksonville Beach club in the standings along the way. Outfielder Myril Hoag, an American League All-Star and three-time World Series winner with the Yankees, suited up for the 1946 Azaleas.

Palatka fielded teams under other names into the early 1960s, but the Azaleas remain the identity the town's baseball history blooms from. The old field, minus its original grandstand, is still in use today.

The Azaleas' 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.