history class

There are some fairly significant Mississippi baseball anniversaries to be celebrated in 2013. In 2003, the independent Jackson Senators won the Central Baseball League championship. Hard to forget Keto Anderson’s game-winning hit in the bottom of the 10th inning of the decisive fifth game at Smith-Wills Stadium. Hard to believe it’s been 10 years. Twenty years ago, the Double-A Jackson Generals won the Texas League championship, the first for the franchise as a Houston Astros affiliate. That was a pretty good club that included the likes of Roberto Petagine, Brian Hunter, Jim Dougherty, Alvin Morman, Lance “Bam-Bam” Madsen and Jackson native Fletcher Thompson. And a hundred years ago — yes, literally, 100 — a Jackson team called the Lawmakers won the Class D Cotton States League title with a 71-24 record. We can assume there was dancing in the streets. Sixty years ago, there was an event that doesn’t warrant celebration but is certainly significant in Jackson’s baseball history. On Aug. 8, 1953, a tornado ripped through downtown Jackson and tore up League Park, where the original Jackson Senators played in a different incarnation of the Cotton States League. The team finished that season playing only road games, and the next year, club owner Ace Hudlin moved it to Greenville. Jackson had had a minor league team almost every year since 1904. But after ’53, the city didn’t host another club until the Jackson Mets arrived at the newly built Smith-Wills in 1975.