Ventura County Gulls

The Ventura County Gulls, based in Ventura, California, played the 1986 season in the California League, returning professional baseball to the coast for the first time since the Channel Cities Oilers era three decades earlier. The franchise arrived when former big league third baseman Ken McMullen led a group, including actor Mark Harmon, that bought the dormant Lodi club and moved it to seaside Ventura County; McMullen knew the league well, having starred for the great 1961 Reno Silver Sox as a young Dodgers prospect.

The Gulls spent their single season as a Toronto Blue Jays affiliate playing at Ventura College, which was intended as a temporary home while a proper ballpark was found. No suitable site materialized, and after one season the franchise was sold and moved inland to become the San Bernardino Spirit, the club that would host Ken Griffey Jr.'s legendary 1988 season and eventually evolve into today's Rancho Cucamonga Quakes.

One season, a borrowed college field, and a seabird name make the Gulls a footnote in league history, but a fitting coda for Ventura, whose entire baseball story, from the Yankees through the Oilers to the Gulls, spans barely a decade of actual play across forty years.

Our design is adapted from original Gulls artwork found in the team's 1986 game programs, swinging seagull and all, a genuine piece of Ventura County baseball graphics rather than a modern invention.