Park City Miners
The Park City Miners, based in Park City, Utah, opened their 1901 season with one of the worst records in the history of professional baseball and were still playing seven years after that. The nickname was as literal as nicknames get. Park City was a silver camp in the Wasatch Range, built around the Ontario mine and the others that followed it up the canyon, and by 1901 the town's entire economy came out of the ground.
The first attempt went badly. Park City were charter members of a four-club circuit alongside the Ogden Lobsters, the Salt Lake City White Wings and a team that split its home games between Farmington and Salt Lake City. The Miners had a 3-20 record when the franchise disbanded on July 15, 1901, and every remaining game on the schedule was recorded as a forfeit. The final published standings show 3-39, last of four, 28 games behind an Ogden club that finished 31-10. The league itself folded after that single season.
The reference books end the story there, and they are wrong. Period newspapers carry the Park City Miners through most of the decade that followed, with games on record in 1902, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907 and 1908. The pattern suggests a local independent club playing whoever was available rather than a fixed league entry, which is why the standard sources lost track of it. The 1906 season included a run in a circuit with Ogden, Salt Lake City and the Tintic mining town of Eureka, and games against the Salt Lake Occidentals, an all-Black club that barnstormed Utah and Idaho in those years and was among the strongest teams in the region.
Park City's baseball ended along with the silver. The mines wound down across the following decades and the town rebuilt itself around skiing, but for most of a decade a mining camp in the Wasatch put a professional team on the field, lost almost every game it played in its first year, and came back anyway. 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.
