The Wilmington Blue Rocks are currently the
minor league baseball team for the city of
Wilmington, DE. The team belongs to the
Carolina League, a class A Advanced
league,
and is a farm team of the Kansas City Royals.
The current incarnation of the team was founded in
1992 with their first season in 1993, but the
name Blue Rocks goes back further.
The origin of organized baseball in Delaware dates back
to the time
of the Civil War, with several professional,
semi-pro, and amateur teams forming and dissolving
over the years. The (original) Delaware Blue Rocks
were founded in 1940, a collaboration between
Bob Carpenter and Connie Mack, then manager of
the Philadelphia Athletics. The
name "Blue Rocks" was taken from the blue granite
that was mined in the Wilmington area. Carpenter
built one of the best (at the time) minor league
ballparks in the nation at 30th Street and Governor Printz Boulevard, and Mack organized
the team to be a part of the Inter-State League and
to serve as a farm club for the Athletics.
The Delaware Blue Rocks lasted thirteen seasons,
through 1952. The first six seasons (they played
straight through World War II) they did admirably
well, with finishes in the top half of the league
every year but 1941. They won the Inter-State
League Pennant in 1946, 1947, 1948, and
1950, but after their season in 1950, many of
the Delaware fans switched allegiance to the major
league Philadelphia Athletics, who won the
National League title that year. Blue Rocks
attendance fell through 1951 and 1952,
and the Blue Rocks called it quits prior to the
1953 season. The baseball park was torn down in the 1960's, long before I was born. Delaware then went
without local professional baseball for forty years.
The idea for a new Blue Rocks team originated in the late
1980's with Steve Taylor, a Delaware native, state
senator, and former pitcher for a New York Yankees
farm team (his pitching career was cut short by injury).
He wanted to start a minor league franchise in Delaware,
and after failing to convince Delaware Tech and the
University of Delaware to allow use of their
facilities, he floated the idea of a stadium in Wilmington past the Delaware legislature. The state agreed to fund
a new baseball stadium in the city, partly as a vanity project for the state, and partly as a revitalization
of Wilmington's decaying downtown. The stadium owners then acquired the Carolina League's
Peninsula Pilots as the city's team in 1992. The
stadium was built in the fall and winter of 1993, and
was originally called Judy Johnson Field at Legends Stadium. The Blue Rocks finally returned in 1993 as the Wilmington Blue Rocks. The field is now called
Judy Johnson Field at Dan Frawley Stadium, Dan Frawley
being the (now deceased) former mayor of Wilmington
during the start of the project.
Out of the past six seasons, the Blue Rocks won the
Carolina League Mills Cup Championship in 1996 and
1998, and played to a 2 games to 2 tie in 1999 against
the Myrtle Beach Pelicans before the season was
canceled due to Hurricane Floyd. In 2001,
they were again in the Championship against the
Salem Avalanche of Salem, VA, to whom they lost three
games to two. (Bummer!)
Sources:
http://www.bluerocks.com/
http://www.rocksfans.com/
http://www.delawarestadiumcorp.com/history001.asp
http://pages.prodigy.com/wilm/baseball.htm
Thanks for VT_hawkeye for the correction on the 2001 series results.