Wheeling Stogies
The Wheeling Stogies, based in Wheeling, West Virginia, take their name from the city's long history as a stogie cigar manufacturing hub. The club was a charter member of the Class B Central League in 1903 and won pennants in 1905, 1909, and 1910, the latter two under manager Bill Phillips.
The 1909 title team featured future Hall of Fame manager Bill McKechnie, who Wheeling sold to the Pittsburgh Pirates at season's end. That same year, the Stogies played a string of exhibition games against major league competition, losing to the New York Giants and Philadelphia Athletics but beating the Athletics 5-4 in front of a small crowd, and then beating the freshly crowned World Series champion Pirates 9-1, though Pittsburgh played mostly backups that day.
Wheeling's run hit a wall in 1912. The Central League expanded to twelve teams and raised player salaries that year, but only four clubs turned a profit under the new costs, so the league simply cut Wheeling and the five other easternmost teams loose after the season. Those six clubs formed a new Interstate League in 1913, but flooding and financial troubles shut that league down by July.
Wheeling reorganized and rejoined the Central League in February 1915. That roster included Greasy Neale, who would go on to win the 1919 World Series with the Cincinnati Reds (against the Black Sox-scandal Chicago White Sox) and later coach the Philadelphia Eagles to two NFL championships. Wheeling finished near the bottom of the standings in 1915 despite Neale, sold him to the Reds the following year, and folded again after 1917 amid wartime disruption.
The Stogies name returned once more in 1925, this time in the Middle Atlantic League, with future Pittsburgh Steelers founder Art Rooney and his brother Dan both in the lineup. The franchise played on through the early 1930s, including a pennant-winning 1933 season as a New York Yankees affiliate, before moving to Akron after the 1934 season, ending professional baseball in Wheeling for good.
The Central League itself was a Class B circuit that ran, often sporadically, from 1903 into the 1930s (with a later 1948-51 revival), fielding teams mostly from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
