The Columbus Red Birds was the name of a top-level minor league baseball team that played in Columbus, Ohio, in the American Association from 1931 through 1954. The Columbus club, a member of the Association continuously since 1902, was previously known as the Columbus Senators — a typical appellation for a team based in a state (or national) capital. It was independently and locally owned through the 1920s.
The economic distress of the Great Depression was accompanied by the rise of the farm system — pioneered by the St. Louis Cardinals' Branch Rickey. The Cardinals purchased minor league teams at all levels to develop their talent as if on an assembly line, and when they needed a second top-level farm club (St. Louis already owned the Rochester Red Wings of the International League), they purchased the struggling Senators club and dubbed it the Red Birds, a popular nickname for the big-league club.
The first business manager of the Red Birds was a baseball novice named Larry MacPhail. A bold promoter, he supervised the building of Redbird Stadium, championed night baseball games, and tried to make baseball more fan-friendly. Attendance tripled between 1930 and 1932. MacPhail left Columbus after a dispute with the Cardinals' ownership, and moved up to Major League Baseball as the general manager of three teams between 1933 and 1947, and earned a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Columbus produced a number of great players, including Hall of Famers Enos Slaughter and Billy Southworth. Slaughter (who batted .382 for the 1937 Red Birds with 245 hits), and won Association titles in 1933, 1934, 1937, 1941–43 and 1950. Southworth managed the 1932 Red Birds. In the early 1950s a series of losing teams, and the encroachment of television, depressed the Red Birds' attendance, and the club moved to Omaha, Nebraska, for the 1955 season and was re-christened the Omaha Cardinals.
Columbus immediately gained a new AAA team when the Ottawa franchise of the International League began playing there in 1955. This club, the Columbus Jets, briefly moved to Charleston, West Virginia, in the 1970s, but then returned to Columbus in 1977 as the Columbus Clippers and was the longtime AAA affiliate (1979–2006) of the New York Yankees, (2007–2008) the Washington Nationals, and in 2009 became the AAA affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.
Read more about Columbus Red Birds: Notable Red Birds Alumni
Famous quotes containing the words columbus, red and/or birds:
“Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called “silent poetry,” and poetry “speaking painting.” The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have fought too much rhetoric and red tape to be lulled and comforted by a paid political advertisement showing a candidate tossing his grandchild in the air while a disembodied voice espouses “family values” in the background.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)
“man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an
evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the
sons of men snared in an evil time,”
—Bible: Hebrew Ecclesiastes (l. IX, 12)