Woonsocket Trotters

The Woonsocket Trotters of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, played one professional baseball game. A charter member of the Class D Atlantic Association in 1908, the club lost its opener, disbanded on May 4, and watched the rest of the league follow it out of business on May 21, three weeks after opening day. The name came from the home grounds: Woonsocket Trotting Park, a harness racing track pressed into service as a ballpark.

The men running it had a better pedigree than the record suggests. Co-managers John Leighton and Buster Burrell had both played on Woonsocket's 1892 New England League champions, a 63-31 club under player-manager Tom O'Brien that finished seven games clear of Portland and then folded after the season anyway. Hi Ladd led that league with 140 hits and O'Brien with 106 runs, and both Leighton and Burrell went on to short big-league careers, Burrell as a catcher in Brooklyn.

The Atlantic Association of 1908 was the second league to use the name and no sturdier than the first. Portland, Lewiston, Pawtucket, Newport and Taunton rounded out the circuit, and by the time it quit, Pawtucket and Newport had folded, Taunton had moved to Attleboro, and only Portland and Lewiston had played more than a dozen games. 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, and a good many of them lasted about as long as the Trotters did.

Woonsocket tried again in 1914 with the Speeders of the Colonial League and once more in 1933 as a mid-season landing spot for the Lawrence Weavers, but the one-game Trotters remain the shortest professional tenure in the city's history.