Williamson Red Birds
The Williamson Red Birds of Williamson, West Virginia played in the Mountain State League for the whole of the league's existence, 1937 through 1942, as the Williamson Colts for the first two seasons and the Red Birds from 1939 on. Williamson was the most consistent club in the six-team league: a winning record in five of six seasons, a playoff appearance in all six, first-place finishes in 1939 and 1940, and the 1940 championship, when the Red Birds went 76-45 under manager Harrison Wickel and beat the Logan Indians three games to one in the finals. The club never finished lower than third.
The most famous player to wear a Williamson uniform was Stan Musial, who arrived from Donora, Pennsylvania in June 1938 as a 17-year-old left-handed pitcher still in high school. He went 6-6 with a 4.66 ERA that first summer and hit .258 as a part-time outfielder. In 1939 he improved to 9-2, but walked 85 batters in 92 innings, and in July Wickel wrote to the Cardinals recommending they release him. What saved him was his bat: pressed into left field after an injury, he hit .352, and the Cardinals moved him off the mound for good after one more season. He reached St. Louis in 1941 and did not hit below .300 again until 1959. The full story of his two summers in Williamson is in our Clipping File post, The Manager Who Tried to Get Rid of Stan Musial.
Williamson's other alumni include catcher Del Rice, who played 17 major league seasons, several alongside Musial in St. Louis; outfielder Hal Rice; and pitcher Ken Holcombe, who won 14 games for the 1939 Red Birds and later pitched for five big league clubs. The managers were notable too: Nat Hickey, who ran the Colts, had been one of the Original Celtics and later became the oldest man ever to play in the NBA, and the 1942 club was managed by Ollie Vanek, the scout who had signed Musial.
The Mountain State League was a Class D circuit from 1937 through 1941 and Class C in 1942, unusually stable for its level, with five of six franchises playing every season. It shut down after 1942 because of World War II. Williamson, a rail town on the Tug Fork at the Kentucky line, was a Cardinals farm club from 1939 on and played at Montezuma Park.
