Peoria Distillers

The Peoria Distillers is a historic baseball team that played in various league across the late 1800s and early 1900s. The team started play in 1891, and bounced around leagues such as the Western Association and Central League until they settled into the Triple I league in 1904. 

The Triple I League (also known as the Illinois - Indiana - Iowa League) was a Class B league that ran from 1901 through 1962 consisting of teams from across Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, and occasionally other midwestern states such as Wisconsin, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. 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. 

The team would play in the Triple I from 1905 until the franchise folded after the 1917 season. They would win the league twice; first in 1911 and again in 1916. In between they were managed by "Pants" Rowland in 1913, who would go on to win the World Series with the Chicago White Sox in 1917, two years before the Black Sox scandal. The origins of Pants' nickname are supposedly that he ran the bases in overalls as a kid during his father's baseball games. 

The Distillers had another interesting piece of baseball history in Joe McGinty, a Baseball Hall of Famer. McGinty, nicknamed "Iron Man" because he worked off-seasons in an iron foundry but also for his longevity on the diamond. In 1898 he pitched the entirety of a 21-inning game for the Distillers. He would play minor baseball until age 54 in 1925, and spent his later seasons around the Triple I league playing-managing teams such as the Danville Veterans and Springfield Senators.