Southeast Arizona Adult Baseball

⚾ WIBL ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING WRAP — THE FOUNDATION IS IN PLACE

The Wichita Independent Baseball League took another major step toward Opening Day on Saturday, August 8, as representatives of all ten founding clubs gathered at the Southwest Boys Club in Wichita for the league's organizational meeting.

What began several months ago as an effort to bring organized adult baseball back to the Wichita area is now a ten-club league preparing to put teams on the field. Saturday's meeting lasted approximately two hours and 15 minutes, bringing together club directors, coaches, league staff and guests for an afternoon of baseball discussion, planning and decision-making as the WIBL prepares for its inaugural Fall 2026 season.

Represented at the meeting were the Butler County Outlaws, Enid Flyers, Goodfellas, ICT Avengers, Whitewater Rapids, Wichita Aeros, Wichita Black Sox, Wichita Braves, Wichita Linemen and Wichita Woodpeckers.

Club representatives included Jesse Rider of the Butler County Outlaws, Todd Stingley of the Enid Flyers, Rob Rotola of Goodfellas, Mark Landwehr of the ICT Avengers, Jayson Chapple of the Whitewater Rapids, Bob Lipp of the Wichita Aeros, Chris Pate of the Wichita Black Sox, Tony Snesrud of the Wichita Braves, Stephen Booth of the Wichita Linemen and Thomas Backus of the Wichita Woodpeckers.

Also attending were WIBL League Assistants Jacob Doffing and Alex Maryman, Whitewater Rapids Head Coach Bobby Horne, Rapids Game Day Supervisor Katrina Horne and Whitewater Mayor Timothy Eldredge.

One of the most significant pieces of business Saturday was the adoption of the Wichita Independent Baseball League Constitution and By-Laws. The documents establish the organizational and governing structure of the WIBL as the league moves from its formation stage into actual competition. The founding club directors reviewed the documents and indicated their approval, with the Constitution and By-Laws officially adopted effective August 8, 2026.

A large portion of Saturday's meeting centered on something everyone in the room has been looking forward to discussing — playing baseball.

The directors worked through playing rules and the realities of operating an adult league. Unlike professional, college or high school baseball, adult baseball includes players balancing jobs, families and other responsibilities. The league wants competitive baseball while also recognizing that players are joining the WIBL because they want an opportunity to get on the field and play.

Batting-order flexibility was discussed at length. Managers will have the ability to use a traditional nine-man batting order or expand their lineup to provide additional players an opportunity to participate. The group also discussed how to handle the inevitable occasion when a club finds itself short of players. The overriding philosophy was simple: whenever reasonably possible, find a way to play the baseball game rather than find a reason not to play it.

The WIBL also adopted the pitch clock for league games and established a 3½-hour game time limit. The time limit will be particularly important on dates when several games are scheduled at the same ballpark and will prevent an unusually long game from disrupting an entire day's schedule.

Scheduling was another major topic.

League officials and club representatives reviewed the Fall 2026 schedule, discussed several adjustments and continued working through the challenge of securing quality adult baseball fields throughout the area. Whitewater, Leon and Wichita-area facilities were among the locations discussed, along with several other communities that could become part of the WIBL's future.

Travel was also part of that conversation. With the Enid Flyers extending the league's footprint into Oklahoma and other clubs and communities already expressing interest in the WIBL, the league discussed ways to make travel reasonable for players. Afternoon games, neutral-site possibilities and even the potential for geographic divisions as the league grows were discussed.

The Fall 2026 season will provide the WIBL an opportunity to learn what works best before moving into a larger Spring and Summer 2027 program.

The directors also established August 15 as the deadline for clubs to submit their current player rosters. The league is developing a centralized system for player registration, roster management, additions and drops, statistics and website information. Every player will also be required to complete the league-prescribed waiver before participating in WIBL competition.

Player safety, insurance requirements and ballpark policies were reviewed. The WIBL has established a no-alcohol policy during league games and within team playing areas and dugouts, with every club additionally required to follow the policies of each individual ballpark.

Saturday's meeting wasn't limited to what happens between the foul lines.

There was considerable discussion about sponsorships, marketing, social media and building value for businesses that choose to partner with the WIBL and its clubs. The league has placed a major emphasis on creating a professional digital presence, promoting its teams and players, maintaining statistics and developing photography, baseball cards and other promotional products that help tell the story of the league.

The philosophy is to create partnerships that work both ways. WIBL clubs want to support the businesses that support adult baseball while giving those businesses measurable exposure through league and team platforms.

League finances were also discussed openly. Startup expenses include insurance, ballpark costs, League-prescribed forms and the many other expenses involved in getting a new baseball league onto the field. The founding clubs paid or made arrangements to pay their initial club fee, providing the League with funding necessary to meet its immediate startup obligations.

The discussion also looked beyond simply paying the bills for the inaugural season. As sponsorship and other League revenue develops, the goal is to build a league capable of supporting more of its own operating costs and, over time, reducing the financial burden on its member clubs and players.

And there was room to talk about some of the fun stuff.

A sample championship ring was brought to the meeting, leading to discussion about championship rings or similar awards for the inaugural Fall 2026 champion. No final purchase commitment was made, but there was certainly no shortage of interest around the table.

Opening Day plans were also discussed, including the possibility of a military aircraft flyover at Whitewater. That possibility is being explored as the league continues putting together the details surrounding its first day of competition.

Perhaps the most important thing to come out of Saturday's two-hour-and-15-minute meeting, however, wasn't a rule, a schedule, a dollar amount or a document.

It was having the people who have spent the past several weeks building ten separate baseball clubs sitting together around one table.

There will be adjustments. There will be challenges. There will undoubtedly be things during this first season that the league learns to do differently the next time around. That's part of building something from the ground up.

But Saturday represented a significant transition for the Wichita Independent Baseball League.

The organizational work is being completed. The Constitution and By-Laws have been adopted. Ten founding clubs are at the table. The clubs are building their rosters. Insurance is in place. Fields are being secured. The schedule is being finalized. Playing rules are taking shape.

What existed only as an idea a few months ago is getting very close to becoming baseball games played on baseball fields.

And very soon, all of the meetings, phone calls, messages, paperwork, graphics, schedules and planning give way to the reason the Wichita Independent Baseball League was created in the first place:

Playing baseball.

⚾ OPENING DAY — AUGUST 22, 2026

WICHITA INDEPENDENT BASEBALL LEAGUE
Inaugural Fall Season — 2026

HIGH STAKES AT HIGH NOON TURNED A BASEBALL PARK INTO BATTLEGROUND

ARIZONA STATE LEAGUE
HOME
STAFF
CANANEA
SIERRA VISTA
TUCSON COWBOYS
TUCSON INDIOS
PLAYERS GO HERE!
HISTORY
ON THIS DATE
Account

Sign In
My Account

THE arizona state league IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS!

ABOUT THE LEAGUE
The ARIZONA STATE LEAGUE revival is underway! The league founder and staff will be visiting former league cities along with other communities to tour ballparks and talk with local officials!

We are TOWNBALL
PLAYERS - REGISTER HERE!
Register here to be placed on your local team or be put on the player free agent list!

REGISTER HERE!
NEWS WIRE
All Posts
HIGH STAKES AT HIGH NOON TURNED A BASEBALL PARK INTO BATTLEGROUND
January 25, 2025

By Tom Danehy – Reprinted from Sports Illustrated April 16, 1984

Baseball was brought to the Southwest by 19th-century settlers who'd become acquainted with the game in the East, and eventually it crossed the border, evolving into the kind of béisbol that produced Fernando Valenzuela. But long before it reached such sophistication, baseball along the border had produced the stuff of legend.

One story told and retold involves a game played 63 years ago next month. It had all the ingredients of a classic showdown—unbeaten teams and obsessive fans. Just after dawn on May 29, 1921, a caravan of cars carrying the semipro Douglas (Arizona) White Sox and their entourage of fans, wives and children drove past the huge Phelps-Dodge copper smelter on the way out of town. Ahead lay a 100-mile trip over rough dirt roads to Nogales, Ariz., home of the White Sox' archrivals, the Nogales Cuervos (Crows).

The two southeastern Arizona communities were markedly similar. Each was a small town adjacent to a larger Mexican city—Douglas to Agua Prieta and Nogales to Mexico's Nogales. Each had a largely Hispanic population, which accounted for a relaxed, natural duality of national allegiance. And each boasted a powerful semipro team of Hispanic makeup that ranked among the best in the two countries. The semipro teams of the day were the forerunners of today's Mexican Leagues.

The Douglas roster was stable for the first time in several years. Many of the players had been part of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, while others had spent time in Mexico fighting for or against Pancho Villa. (Villa had attacked Agua Prieta shortly before his bold incursion into the U.S. at Columbus, N. Mex. in 1916.)

The White Sox had won their first 12 games of the young season, mostly against competition from the state of Sonora, across the border. The Cuervos' 19-0 record was even more impressive, for the Nogales club had swept all eight games on a California road trip. Both teams had beaten visiting professional clubs.

In Nogales, the festivities began long before the arrival of the Douglas team. Despite Prohibition, liquor was easy to come by. Thousands of fans from all over Arizona and Sonora flooded into the Nogaleses. Among the fans were hundreds of U.S. soldiers from nearby Fort Huachuca (which had been the base of cavalry operations against Cochise and Geronimo and was the adopted home of the Harlem Globetrotters a few years ago). Because of the size of the crowd, it was decided that the game would be played in the 10,000-seat municipal stadium on the Mexican side of the border. Predictably, there was heavy betting. Thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands of pesos were wagered at even money.

The game began at high noon, with the temperature over 100°. The first ball was thrown out by the governor of Sonora, who was surrounded by a contingent of federates assigned to allay fears of an attack by the still-active Villa.

The game quickly settled into a pitching duel between Tachi Ruiz of Douglas and Arsenio (Indio) Bernal of Nogales. The two traded strikeouts and both had no-hitters through the fifth inning. The 20,000 fans who had squeezed into the stadium roared with each pitch and bet some more between innings. It became increasingly apparent that the game's outcome would probably be determined by one big play.

Bernal began to tire in the late going but he maintained his shutout with the help of some fine defensive plays and generous calls by the local umpiring crew. The teams battled into the ninth, still in a scoreless tie. Ruiz led off the inning for Douglas with a line drive to left that got past the fielder and bounced to the wall. Ruiz slid into third well ahead of the throw. His slide, however, dislodged the bag and sent it skittering into foul territory. Ruiz, breathing hard from the exertion, sat slumped over on the spot where the bag had been. The relay throw finally came in to the third baseman, who casually tagged Ruiz where he sat. Immediately, the home-plate umpire, who had moved about halfway up the line, raised his right hand and loudly called Ruiz out.

Ruiz jumped to his feet and ran to confront the umpire, who tossed him out of the game. The entire White Sox team bolted off the bench and surrounded the umpire, pleading its case to no avail. Hundreds of fans poured onto the field to protest. Losing money was one thing; to feel that it was being stolen was quite another.

The umpire took off toward centerfield with several irate Douglas fans in pursuit. The situation worsened when large numbers of Nogales fans ran on the field hoping to head off the Douglas throng and perhaps, in the process, save the umpire.

Now the armed federates left the stands with orders from the governor to clear the field. The soldiers formed a line and moved out into the swirl of assorted fistfights. The federates seemed to disappear into the crowd, their line broken, their unity shattered. Near the pitcher's mound, one federal was knocked to the ground and, for one reason or another, fired his weapon wildly as he fell. The sound of the shot brought shrieks of surprise and touched off a riot. That, in turn, panicked the federates, who began shooting at random into the crowd. The resulting stampede may well have caused more injuries than did the fusillade that prompted it.

The federates fought their way off the field and set up a defensive perimeter near the governor's box. They held their rifles at the ready but didn't fire them again that day. Just as suddenly as the panic began, it ended. The passion was spent, the fighting was over.

Those who could stumbled back into the stands, leaving the field littered with the bodies of those who had fallen. The tally included one dead, over a dozen hospitalized with gunshot wounds and scores with various other injuries. As a deathly calm descended over the stadium, the field was cleared of the casualties and, to the surprise of few, the game was resumed.

The "out" call against Ruiz stood, as did his ejection. The Nogales team retook the field and the game picked up with one out in the visitors' half of the ninth inning. Unsettled by the violence (and perhaps by the bloodstains near the mound), Bernal walked the next two batters before getting the second out of the inning on a called third strike. That brought to the plate Douglas cleanup hitter and second baseman Amado (Chief) Gutierrez.

A legendary figure in Sonoran baseball, Gutierrez had a playing career that spanned eight decades. He was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1870, and he played for several Mexican and American teams, plying his skills wherever the money and/or competition was the best. The earliest available records show that Gutierrez was pitching in the El Paso area in 1888 and he was still playing regularly for a semipro team well after World War II and well into his 70s.

The only gaps in his border baseball career included a brief stint with the Chicago White Sox at the turn of the century and service in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War and World War I. It wasn't until after World War I—when he was nearly 50—that Gutierrez married and started a family, which ultimately included four sons and three daughters. He took a full-time railroad job and settled down in the Douglas-Agua Prieta area.

So great was his impact on baseball there that the municipal stadium in Agua Prieta was going to be named Chief Gutierrez Stadium. (However, the town politicians named the stadium after the governor of Sonora.) It was in this ball park that Gutierrez accomplished a feat that may never be duplicated. The leftfield wall runs parallel to the international border, which is some 50 feet to the north. When in 1930 Gutierrez hit a towering smash out of the park in a Mexican League game, he may have become the only man ever to hit a home run from one country to another.

While the international home run may have been his most unusual, it didn't come close to matching the drama of his ninth-inning shot to dead centerfield that day in Nogales. Bernal appeared to have regained his control after walking the two batters and then striking out the next one. All he had to do was retire Gutierrez to keep Nogales even going into the bottom of the ninth. But after taking a curve for a strike. Gutierrez hit the second pitch far over the centerfield wall for a three-run homer. He then took the mound in the bottom of the ninth and preserved the victory for Ruiz and the White Sox.

The Douglas fans collected their winnings and began their celebration. The White Sox, however, weren't in a mood to carouse. Weary from the game and stunned by the carnage, the Sox players simply wanted to go home. They piled into their cars, drove across the border and headed for the road that is now Highway 92. Near the outskirts of town, they ran into a roadblock set up by angry Nogales fans. At gunpoint, the White Sox were persuaded to stay overnight in Nogales and give the Cuervos a rematch the following day. The Douglas players were allowed to send their families home, while they themselves spent the night sleeping in their cars or camped out at the ball park.

The news of the rematch spread through town quickly but so, too, did an understanding of the circumstances under which the game was agreed. By the time the game started the following day, there wasn't a pro-Douglas bettor to be found. Correct or not, the word was out that Douglas wouldn't be going home until Nogales had its revenge, and the White Sox planned to go home as soon as possible.

Greg Louganis couldn't have taken a better dive. The White Sox hit the ball better than they had the day before, but they managed to stay comfortably behind the Cuervos and lost 15-8. When the White Sox left Nogales, they did so with little fanfare and no opposition. Douglas and Nogales would play each other several more times that year in both cities, but they did so before small, relatively subdued crowds. The White Sox won the season series and capped off a superb season by defeating the national champions from Mexico City.

The White Sox and Cuervos dominated the baseball scene along the border for the rest of the decade. Both teams eventually broke up, with the players retiring, joining Sonoran teams or forming new teams in their hometowns. Some of the players were instrumental in forming the legendary Bisbee-Douglas Copper Kings, a team that beat AAA and major league competition in the '40s and '50s.

Few of the players who participated in that deadly Nogales game are still alive. Gutierrez died in 1974 at age 104, of what was later deemed to have been unnecessary surgery for prostate problems just a few months before the birth of his grandson, Amado III. The child's father, Amado II, had had a promising baseball career interrupted by World War II; he later played on the Bisbee-Douglas Copper Kings.

The two Mexican communities of Agua Prieta and Nogales now have teams in the Mexican Leagues, but in Douglas and the U.S. Nogales, the banner has been passed to the younger generation. In the past eight years, teams from Douglas have won two state high school championships, one state Little League title and seven Babe Ruth age-division crowns. Nogales teams have won several Babe Ruth titles, and the town was picked to host the 1979 national Babe Ruth tournament.

Baseball tradition runs deep and strong in the two communities, with many of today's players tracing family ties back to the old White Sox and Cuervos. Three years ago, Douglas and Nogales high schools ended their league schedule tied for first and had a playoff to help determine the state tournament seeding. The game went extra innings, with No-gales getting five runs in the 11th to win. Nogales had nine runs on 11 hits, Douglas five runs on nine hits. All was calm.

Rickey Henderson RIP

RIP Pete Rose. The Hit King. An absolute LEGEND. PUT HIM IN THE HALL OF FAME! 🙏

People watching a Chicago Cubs baseball game outside Wrigley Field in 1932.

1952 Topps display at Woolworth's.

Baseball fans fill the grandstand at Cananea Stadium, circa 1955