History of Baseball on the Coast

Buy some peanuts and cracker jacks, in 1906 the first professional baseball team called South Mississippi home. That’s according to Gary Higginbotham, a sports history freelancer who presented the history and research of baseball on the Gulf Coast to the Pass Christian Historical Society today. News 25’s Kristen Durand has more.
Take me out to the Sand Crabs game is a phrase you might have said if you lived in South Mississippi in 1906. The Gulfport Sand Crabs were the first professional baseball team to call the Coast home. Biloxi jumped on board in 1908. Sports history freelancer Gary Higginbotham said, “The 1908 Gulfport Sand Crabs went over to Biloxi and they talked to the people over there. They were baseball aficionados, I guess you might say. The business people over there agreed to sell half the team for $1,000.”
Unfortunately for a Class D team to be successful, the base population of the surrounding area needed to be at about 50,000 and Harrison County didn’t quite meet that mark to make the team profitable. The Sand Crabs fizzled out shortly after, but baseball made a comeback in 1926 with the Gulfport Tarpons, according to Higginbotham as he told the Pass Christian Historical Society. “They also had the Boston Red Sox in 1926. They came through here and played an exhibition game and believe it or not, the Tarpons won it,” said Higginbotham.
With the folding of the Tarpons, baseball on the Coast included mostly spring training and semi-pro teams including the Biloxi Dodgers of the Southern Negro League in the late 1940s. The team started out as an all black team that eventually recruited white players, bringing together fans of all races to Biloxi Stadium. “And so it was kind of an integrated ball park way ahead of its time. This was during the time when you had Jim Crow laws and all this other stuff down here. You couldn’t sit together as you do today,” said Higginbotham.
Fast forward to today and MGM Park is home to the Biloxi Shuckers, a team Higginbotham says is a top team for talent moving on to the Major League. “The Shuckers right now is the team the Milwaukee Brewers are stacking talent up with. We’re going to have a very powerful club down here within the next three or four years because of that,” said Higginbotham.