Aberdeen Pheasants (Prairie League)
minor league baseball team
The Aberdeen Pheasants were a professional baseball team that played in the Prairie League from 1995 to 1997. They were based in Aberdeen, South Dakota and played their home games at Fossum Field.
History
Aberdeen had a team in the Northern League for its entire post-WW2 runtime, also named the Aberdeen Pheasants, but the league folded after the 1971 season and Aberdeen was left without professional baseball. The new Northern League and the North Central League both contacted Aberdeen about a franchise, but were told that Fossum Field was not up to professional standards.
In 1994, Aberdeen joined the Prairie League, a new independent baseball league, for their 1995 season. The city spent $130,000 on improvements on Fossum Field, replacing the chain link fence with a wooden one and building an entirely new clubhouse. The team's mascot was planned to be a hunting dog, but instead the team adopted a season ticket holder who came to games wearing a mask and costume as their mascot.
1958 MLB Cy Young Award winner and 1949 Aberdeen Pheasant Bob Turley threw out of the first pitch of the Pheasants' first home game. Over the 1995 season, the Pheasants went 56–13 and set the record for highest minor league short-season winning percentage at .812. However, they lost the best-of-five league championship series to the Regina Cyclones.
The public source identifies “Aberdeen Pheasants (Prairie League)” as minor league baseball team. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Aberdeen, Pheasants and Prairie.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aberdeen Pheasants (Prairie League)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.