St. Joseph Saints

The Saints were the name St. Joseph, Missouri kept coming back to. The city fielded Saints teams in the Western League across three separate stretches, with an interlude as the Drummers in the 1910s, when Hall of Famer Dazzy Vance passed through on his way up. The most famous Saint of all arrived in 1930, when the club spent a season as a St. Louis Cardinals affiliate and a 20-year-old farmhand named Dizzy Dean won 17 games on his way to becoming the last National League pitcher to win 30 in a season.

The franchise saved its best for last. The Saints won three consecutive Western League championships in 1933, 1934, and 1935, the first under manager Dutch Zwilling and the next two under Earle Brucker. Then came one of the crueler endings in minor league history: after the 1935 title, the Western League contracted from eight teams to six, and the three-time defending champions were simply cut from the league. St. Joseph went without professional baseball for three years before joining the Western Association, where a later Saints-line club employed a young Earl Weaver years before his Hall of Fame managing career.

The Western League was a Class A circuit for most of its life, operating from 1900 through 1937 and again from 1947 through 1958, fielding teams across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states, including Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, and later Texas and New Mexico. For its first decade it stood just one step below the major leagues. An earlier league of the same name, which ran from 1885 to 1899, renamed itself the American League in 1900 and lives on today as one half of Major League Baseball.