Dissolved Defunct Sports Teams Florida Magnets

So how, exactly, did the capital of West Virginia end up with a minor league baseball team named for a tropical saltwater sport fish for a few short months in the summer of 1961? At the dawn of the 1960’s, a colorful, corpulent South Florida multi-millionaire named Bill MacDonald bought the forlorn Miami Marlins of the Class AAA International League. The Marlins were the top farm club of the Baltimore Orioles at the time. MacDonald was a sportsman – he owned a stud farm, a share of the Tropical Park race track and he would later promote the first Sonny Liston-Cassius Clay fight in Miami. The Marlins were rather unloved in Miami. A particular sore point for MacDonald was the team’s lack of a profitable local radio deal.

After one summer at the helm in Miami, Bill MacDonald announced a scheme to move the Marlins to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where a lucrative radio contract beckoned. The International League approved the shift in late November 1960. It was a decision that MacDonald’s fellow I.L. owners would soon come to regret. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Orioles transferred their Class AAA farm club to Rochester, New York and the Marlins became an affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals stocked San Juan with several top prospects, including 19-year old catcher Tim McCarver, slick fielding shortstop Dal Maxvill and pitching ace Ray Washburn (16-9, 2.34). All three would go on to spend most of the next decade in St. Louis.

The Beaumont Golden Gators were a four-year entry in the Texas League during the mid-1980’s. Though a San Diego Padres farm club, the Gators wore an eye-popping Gold/Green/White color scheme more reminiscent of the Oakland Athletics, topped off by pillbox-style striped caps. The team played at Vincent-Beck Stadium on the campus of Lamar University.

The Fort Pierce Bombers were a professional minor league baseball team based in Fort Pierce, Florida from 1940 until 1942. The clubs played in the Class-D Florida East Coast League. The league and the team both shut their doors, along with many other minor leagues, a few months after the United States entered World War II, and, despite the postwar baseball boom, they were not revived.