The Lansing Lugnuts are celebrating their 30th season with Opening Day this week, but minor league baseball in the city goes back nearly 140 years.
The Lansing Farmers were a part of the Michigan State League for the 1889 and 1890 seasons, facing teams like the Jackson Jaxons and the Kalamazoo Kazoos.
Leagues in Michigan operated in stops and starts over the course of about five decades, which means there wasn’t ever continuous play.
In 1895, the team came back as the Lansing Senators, the name a nod to the city being home to the State Capitol. According to the MLB, pioneering African American baseball player Bud Fowler was with the Senators that year. At the time, he also co-founded an all-Black baseball team, the Page Fence Giants, in Adrian, which played in the Negro leagues and against white club and league teams.
In 1940, the Senators became the Lancers before returning to their former name for one last season in the league.
After that, minor league baseball was absent from Lansing for decades until the Lugnuts started play in 1996.
While Jackson doesn’t have a current minor league team, the city has hosted teams in the late 19thand early 20th centuries including the aforementioned Jaxons, the Convicts (in reference to the state prison in the community), the White Sox, the Chiefs, Wolverines and the Vets.
But baseball wasn’t completely absent from the Capital Region for all those years between the Senators and the Lugnuts.
The Capital Area District Libraries Local History Archives have images of multiple club teams, some associated with churches like the historic Franklin Avenue Presbyterian Church and others with workplaces including Oldsmobile and the Lansing Wheelbarrow Company.
There’s also teams in the archives called the Lansing Vans and the South Cedar Merchants among other unidentified groups of players with Lansing jerseys showing that America's pastime was clearly an important part of Lansing history and culture.
Interview Transcript
Melorie Begay: It’s Opening Day for the Lansing Lugnuts as they start a series against the Dayton Dragons tonight.
The team is celebrating its 30th season, but Lansing’s baseball history stretches back nearly 140 years.
All Things Considered host Sophia Saliby took a look back at the earliest teams that played in the city, and she joins us now. Thank you for being here.
Sophia Saliby: Thanks for having me.
Begay: So, what got you interested in this story?
Saliby: It started just with me scrolling on Instagram a couple days ago, and I saw someone talking about funny old baseball team names. And I said, Oh, I wonder if there's a funny baseball team name here in the Lansing area, and there definitely are some interesting ones.
Begay: Ok, so what other minor league teams has Lansing hosted?
Saliby: So, the thing to understand is that leagues were running in stops and starts from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, so there was never truly continuous play for teams. They would join the league that would start and then disband a few years later. But to start here in Lansing, there were the Lansing Farmers in 1889 and they played for, I think, two seasons, and then about six years later, the team came back as the Lansing Senators as a nod to the Michigan State Capitol.
And then, years of play on and off, and then they were the Lansing Lancers for a season before returning to the Senators for one last season around 1940.
Begay: So, are there any other interesting names for Michigan teams?
Saliby: Yeah, there are some fun ones. Let's start with Jackson. There was a team called the Convicts because of the state prison there, so less fun.
But then there's the Kalamazoo Kazoos, the Holland Wooden Shoes, the Battle Creek Adventists, and then the Adrian Reformers that were also known as the Adrian Demons.
Begay: Oh, ok. That's interesting. And you also found some history when it comes to a pioneering Black baseball player who spent some time in Lansing. Can you tell us about that?
Saliby: Yeah, so the color line hadn't officially been established, segregating white and Black players that early on. So, sometimes you'd see an African American player on a majority white team or all Black teams would play white teams in professional leagues. It was kind of all over the place, just as there were leagues starting and stopping before kind of the MLB and the minor league baseball leagues were established.
One pioneer was Baseball Hall of Famer Bud Fowler, who was a Black player. He basically jumped around the country playing baseball for different teams. He was with the Lansing Senators for one season in 1895 and at that same time, he helped co-found the Adrian Page Fence Giants, which would play in the Negro Leagues as well as against white teams in the Michigan State League.
Begay: What about other baseball teams in Lansing that were just a part of club leagues?
Saliby: So, I love the Local History Archive that the Capital Area District Library has. I was looking for, you know, maybe there weren't minor league teams from about 1940 to 1996 when the Lugnuts started, so who else was playing at the time? And there were a lot of recreational and club leagues.
Some were associated with churches like the Franklin Avenue Presbyterian Church. Others with workplaces, like Oldsmobile, of course, and the Lansing Wheelbarrow Company. And then I found some other teams and some unidentified pictures of teams on the archive, ones for the Lansing Vans, which might have been associated with a hardware store, the South Cedar Merchants. And then a lot of ones that just have Lansing on their jerseys, but they're really fun to look at and see. you know, what were people wearing as they played baseball in different eras. Because some of these photos are from the early 1900s all the way to about 1960, so there's quite a lot on there that I had fun finding.
Begay: All right. Sophia Saliby hosts All Things Considered. You can find her story and some pictures of these teams at wkar.org.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
