Buffalo Bisons (1886–1970)
defunct minor league baseball team from Buffalo, New York
The Buffalo Bisons were a professional Triple-A minor league baseball team based in Buffalo, New York, that was founded in 1886 and last played in the International League from 1912 to 1970.
Over the course of their existence, the Bisons won the Junior World Series three times (1904, 1906, and 1961). They also won 10 league championships, including the inaugural Governors' Cup in 1933. The 1927 Bisons were recognized as one of the 100 greatest minor league teams of all time.
The team was last affiliated with the Montreal Expos of Major League Baseball and played its home games at War Memorial Stadium. The franchise moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the middle of the 1970 season to become the Winnipeg Whips.
History
Organized baseball in Buffalo had existed since at least 1859, when the Niagara baseball club of the National Association of Base Ball Players played its first season. The first professional team to play in Buffalo began in 1877 as a member of the League Alliance; this team was invited to become a major league club, the Buffalo Bisons of the National League, and played from 1879 to 1885. In 1886, the Bisons moved into minor league baseball as members of the original International League, then known as the Eastern League. (An "outlaw" team also known as the Buffalo Bisons played in the Players' League, an upstart third major league, in 1890, but that team is not considered part of the Bisons history.) This team joined the Western League in 1899, and was within weeks of becoming a major league team when the Western League announced it was becoming a major league and changing its name to the American League in 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “Buffalo Bisons (1886–1970)” 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.