Savannah Electrics

The Savannah Electrics, based in Savannah, Georgia, went 53-38 in the Southern League in 1893, finishing among the league's better clubs in a season cut short on August 12 after the league president resigned six weeks earlier.

The name is one of the odder entries in the league's records. In January 1893 a new Savannah baseball syndicate was closing on a ballpark, and the Electric Railway Company was expected to secure it, with the diamond to sit on the company's own grounds outside the city. Record books list that season's club as the Electrics. Period coverage never connects the two directly, and Savannah is shown playing at Bolton Street Park that year rather than at any electric company grounds, so whether the players were genuinely known as the Electrics or the name simply drifted over from the railway is not something the surviving papers settle.

Expectations that spring were high. The syndicate's manager, Manning, had run the Kansas City club for six years and had managed Birmingham to the 1892 Southern League pennant. Sporting Life picked Savannah to take the 1893 flag, and Gus Schmelz of Chattanooga conceded in print that the players Manning was chasing could not be signed within the league salary limit. Savannah opened at home against Atlanta on April 10.

The city's strongest nineteenth century club had come earlier. Savannah went 59-33 in 1886 and finished second, five games behind Atlanta, carried by Hank O'Day, who went 26-11 and was signed by the major league Detroit Wolverines immediately after the season. O'Day spent most of his career as an umpire and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2013. Savannah fielded the Modocs in 1894 and the Pathfinders in 1904, and kept professional baseball in the city in one form or another for most of the century that followed.