Petaluma Pets

The Petaluma Pets, based in Petaluma, California, played the 1903 season in the California State League, giving the famous poultry town north of San Francisco its moment in the professional game. The Pets name was classic small-town wordplay of the period, a rhyming nickname of the sort that filled early minor league standings, and it belonged to a city then beginning its rise as the self-proclaimed Egg Basket of the World.

Petaluma was among the smallest markets ever to attempt professional baseball in the Bay Area's orbit, and one season in the outlaw league proved to be the extent of it. The city's baseball energy afterward went into the semi-pro and town-team circuits that thrived across Sonoma County for decades.

In the first half of the 1900s, professional baseball reached into towns of every size across America, with leagues rising and folding year to year as cities looked for entertainment in the era before television. The outlaw California circuits were especially fluid, and clubs like the Pets, here for a season and gone, were as much a part of the game's fabric as the franchises that lasted.