San Bernardino Stars

The San Bernardino Stars, based in San Bernardino, California, were a charter member of the California League, founded in 1941 as a Class C circuit. The Stars operated as an independent club without a major league parent, a hard road even in good times, and the season proved short: on June 29, 1941, the Stars and the Riverside Reds both disbanded, reducing the league's first campaign from eight teams to six.

Those few months were San Bernardino's only taste of the California League for nearly half a century. The Sunset League's Valencias and Pioneers passed through from 1948 to 1950, and then the city waited 37 years for professional baseball to return, which it finally did in 1987 with the San Bernardino Spirit at the same Perris Hill ballpark grounds where the game had been played decades earlier.

In the first half of the 1900s, professional baseball reached into towns of every size across America, and short-lived clubs like the Stars were part of the game's fabric, with leagues routinely absorbing midseason failures and playing on.