Tucson Lizards

The Tucson Lizards were Tucson, Arizona's professional baseball club for a single season, 1932, in the Class D Arizona-Texas League. They were the same club that had played as the Tucson Missions in 1931, renamed for the new year, and locals called them the Stick Lizards.

The club was run by Hiram Corbett, the Tucson businessman the city's ballpark would later be named for, and the 1931 Missions finished second at 72-59 behind pitcher Joe Sullivan's 23 wins. The 1932 season is remembered for one night. On June 10, 1932, lights were switched on at the ballpark for the first time, and to sell tickets the club put a 19-year-old outfielder named Vince DiMaggio on the back of a truck with a megaphone and drove him through downtown. Admission went up to 75 cents to pay for the lights, with a printed apology to fans.

DiMaggio, the oldest of the three DiMaggio brothers, had been sent to Tucson by the San Francisco Seals and led the league in home runs. He was called up when the circuit disbanded on July 24, 1932, with the Lizards at 44-53, and went on to a ten-year major league career and two All-Star selections. Manager Mickey Shader had come over from the Globe Bears.

Professional baseball returned to Tucson in 1937 under the Cowboys name. In the first half of the 1900s, teams existed in thousands of small towns across the United States, as Americans looked for recreational activities and entertainment in the era before TV.