Vincennes Alices

The Vincennes Alices, based in Vincennes, Indiana, were a charter member of the KITTY League in 1903 and carried one of the most unusual names in minor league baseball, taken from Alice Roussillon, the fictional heroine of the 1900 bestseller Alice of Old Vincennes, who raises the American flag over Fort Sackville in the novel's Revolutionary War story. The name was not official at first; in the league's opening weeks the papers floated two nicknames for the club, "Chaney's Pets" after manager H.L. Chaney and the Alices after the novel's heroine, and it was the fictional girl whose name history kept. We traced the name's strange, thin life through the 1900s newspapers, on our blog.

The team's early years were rocky: dropped from the league five weeks into 1903, then a last-place 1904 season played as the Reds for the color of their uniforms. But under manager Eddie Kolb, who as a teenager had famously pitched the final game in Cleveland Spiders history, Vincennes won back-to-back championships, taking the 1905 title in a thirteen-game series against Paducah, seven games to six, after a yellow fever epidemic halted the season, then running away with the 1906 pennant behind Hub Perdue's 25 wins. A third championship followed in 1910 before the franchise played its final season in 1913. The name outlived the ballclub: Vincennes Lincoln High School adopted the Alices in 1923 and carries the name to this day, and the team's old grounds survive as Kimmell Park. The KITTY League (the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League) was a Class D league that operated intermittently from 1903 to 1955, with teams across Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee, Indiana, and neighboring states.