Sharon Steels

The Sharon Steels played in Sharon, Pennsylvania, a Shenango Valley mill town on the Ohio line, in the first two seasons of the Ohio-Pennsylvania League in 1905 and 1906. The club was backed by the Carnegie Steel Company, and its name was chosen for a reason the local papers reported plainly at the time: calling it the Steel team would, in the words of the Record-Argus that March, "avoid any jealousy between the two Sharons."

The manager was Frank Killen, a Pittsburgh native who had been the best pitcher in the National League in 1893 and who had pitched for both Pittsburgh and Washington. He was in demand that spring. Before Sharon settled the matter in mid-March, Killen had offers to coach at Washington and Jefferson and at Indiana Normal, an invitation to umpire in the New York State League, and an independent club in Lancaster, Ohio that wanted him to pitch.

He was not a manager only. In June the Pittsburgh Post sent word from Sharon that Killen had thrown his first game of the season against Butler and looked like his old self, striking out five of the first six men he faced. He would have had a shutout except that his second baseman booted a grounder and let three runs in. Sharon finished 1905 at 29-39, in a league the Youngstown Ohio Works ran away with at 88-35.

The Steels name lasted two seasons before the club became the Sharon Giants in 1907 and 1908 and then folded. Baseball returned to the city by way of a neighbor's collapse, when the New Castle Nocks moved twenty miles up the road in August 1911 and finished as the Sharon Travelers at 35-101-1. A period listing of the circuit's nicknames for one season had Sharon down as the Medicine Men, a name that appears nowhere in the surviving statistical record.

The Ohio-Pennsylvania League was a Class C circuit founded in Akron in 1905 by veteran ballplayer Charlie Morton, fielding teams across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia before folding in 1912.