Baseball in Huntsville

The Rocket City Trash Pandas, who made their Class AA South debut last summer, rekindled the interest in professional baseball in this area. As a journalist, it rekindled my interest in looking at the team with some historical context, to the first baseball team in the area (in 1903, with Ty Cobb as a visiting player) to the arrival of the first affiliated team (in 1985) and its ultimate demise. I discovered interesting characters of the early days (the first “graduate” from Huntsville to the majors once placed a dead rat in a sportswriter’s bed, perhaps a precursor to the horse’s head in The Godfather). The Huntsville Stars era was populated with some legendary players, like Jose Canseco, who was the league MVP in the first year of the franchise, Mark McGwire, Tim Hudson, Ryan Braun and Nelson Cruz. The Huntsville area also produced some fascinating players like Gabby Street, famous for catching a ball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument, Jimmy Key, Craig Kimbrel and our “Mr. Baseball,” Don Mincher, who homered in his first World Series at-bat, enjoyed a 14-year career in the majors, became a team general manager, owner and, ultimately, president of the Southern League. Even as people embrace the freshness of the Trash Pandas, so often the conversation will turn to “I remember when…” moments from the Stars’ era.