Sports History
Industrial Baseball
By Anne Madarasz

The All-Star Game gave Pittsburgh an opportunity to share its 100-plus year history of professional baseball with a national audience. The people of this region have long identified with the Pirates, showing up by the busload at Forbes Field for community days, cheering on the "City of Champions" Buccos at Three Rivers, and coming by the carload to PNC Park.

While we have gathered together in Pittsburgh's ballparks as fans, there is also a rich history of the sport that is rooted in local communities. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, at a time when professional sports began to turn into a commercial enterprise, there also existed a strong tradition of amateur sports. An integral part of everyday life, sports brought together the members of a community to mingle, socialize, and enjoy friendships, while also fulfilling the need to compete. On the rough-hewn diamonds of coal and steel towns across the region, company ballteams unified employees through the sharing of a common experience. The success of those teams often enhanced employee moral and created community pride.

These coal, coke, and steel teams, were often funded by companies to quell rising worker discontent caused by long hours, low pay, and hazardous working conditions. But the company teams also became vehicles of worker camaraderie, bringing together people of often diverse ethnic backgrounds to play America's game.

Baseball flourished in the steel towns up and down the river, companies such as Edgar Thomson, J & L, and the Homestead Works sponsored all manner of sports teams. Make shift diamonds also sprouted in the shadow of mine tipples in the coal country of western Pennsylvania. Industrial leagues organized the competitions between companies. The Cambria County Industrial League, founded in 1939, pitted coal miners and steel workers from towns such as Johnstown, Portage, and Ebensburg, against one another. In Indiana County, the Rochester and Pittsburgh League organized hundreds of players. One stellar competitor for that league, Frank Mlakar, a pitcher for the Lucerne team that captured the 1949 championship, reported big crowds in attendance, "over three thousand would come to see our games."

A vital force in these industrial communities in the first half of the 20th century, the leagues began to fade in the late 1950s as suburbanization settled workers further from the factory and as television impacted leisure time and sport. For over half a century however, the people of this region forged a common bond on the ball fields.

Anne Madarasz is the Director of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum, which features the story of industrial baseball.