West Palm Beach Sheriffs

The West Palm Beach Sheriffs of West Palm Beach, Florida were the first professional baseball team the city ever had, joining central Florida's league for the 1928 season as part of its late-decade push down the Atlantic coast. Their debut, on April 26, 1928 at Daytona Beach, set the tone for the era: a 7-5 loss played before 3,000 fans, with United States Senator Park Trammell throwing out the first ball, the Daytona pitcher baffling Sheriff hitters with an underhanded delivery, and, in the fourth inning of the first game in franchise history, manager Ernie Burke getting ejected for arguing a call at first base too strenuously. An outfielder named Hogan finished the game at first base in his place. The papers approvingly noted the afternoon featured "plenty of umpire baiting."

The Sheriffs' only season was also the league's last for a while; the circuit went dark after 1928, and that same September the great Okeechobee hurricane devastated Palm Beach County, one of the deadliest storms in American history. Between the disaster and the Depression that followed, professional baseball did not return to West Palm Beach until 1940.

The Sheriffs' league began play in 1919 as a Class D circuit of six teams clustered across central Florida, tracing what would later become the I-4 corridor decades before the interstate existed. The circuit ran through 1928, went dark during the Depression, returned in 1936, paused again for World War II, and resumed in 1946. Unlike most minor leagues of the era, it never truly died; the same circuit still operates across Florida today.

In the 1800s and 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.