San Francisco Mission Reds
The San Francisco Mission Reds played in the Pacific Coast League from 1926 through 1937, the "other team" in a two-team baseball city, representing the working-class Mission District while the beloved Seals got the headlines. The franchise arrived from Southern California, where it had been the Vernon Tigers, and went by Mission Bells in its first seasons before settling on Mission Reds by 1928; fans and writers also called them the Monks or simply the Missions.
The Reds hit like few teams anywhere, ever. Playing at Recreation Park, whose right field fence stood just 235 feet away behind a 50-foot chicken wire screen, the 1929 club batted .319 as a team and produced one of the most famous seasons in minor league history: Ike Boone won the PCL Triple Crown with a .407 average, 55 home runs, and 218 RBIs, still among the gaudiest stat lines the game has recorded. Even so, the Reds lost the championship series that year, as close as the club ever came to a pennant. Ox Eckhardt kept the tradition going, setting the PCL record with a .414 average in 1933 and winning the 1935 batting title at .399, edging a 20-year-old Seals outfielder named Joe DiMaggio by a single point; Eckhardt still holds the highest combined professional batting average ever recorded, a point ahead of Ty Cobb.
The only Hall of Famer ever to wear the uniform was a local: Harry Hooper, the St. Mary's College product who had begun his professional career with the Alameda Grays in 1907, returned home to serve as the club's playing manager in 1927 after his long Red Sox and White Sox career.
The Reds never solved their real problem, which was the Seals. Consistently outdrawn even while sharing Seals Stadium after 1931, the franchise gave up on San Francisco after the 1937 season and moved south to become the Hollywood Stars, one of the PCL's glamour franchises. The Mission Reds remain a cult favorite of uniform collectors and PCL historians, the hard-hitting, hard-luck team from the wrong side of a one-team town that briefly had two.
