Former home-run king Henry Aaron began his professional baseball career in Eau Claire,Wis., in 1952, so the Northwoods League championship won Sunday by the Eau Claire Express hardly ranks as the most memorable event in the city’s long and often rich baseball history.
But the conquest was significant nonetheless as it propelled the Express to its first Northwoods League title and a No. 1 ranking in PG CrossChecker’s final 2010 ranking of the nation’s top summer-league clubs.
Eau Claire finished with a 52-24 record overall this summer, winning both the Northwoods League’s first- and second-half titles, and sealing the deal by capturing both rounds of the league’s best-of-3 playoffs. The Express clinched the title and top ranking by beating the Rochester Honkers 9-1 Sunday in Eau Claire. The team’s 52 wins were the most by any summer team.
Outfielder Steve McGuiggan (Illinois-Chicago) powered Eau Claire to the title by drilling a pair of two-run homers and throwing out a runner at the plate from center field. In all, he went 3-for-4 with four RBIs. Lefthander Felix Cardenas (Texas-Permian Basin) stymied a predominantly lefthanded-hitting Rochester lineup through seven innings, allowing just five hits.
Neither McGuiggan nor Cardenas, or even outfielder Drew Heithoff (Augustana, S.D.,), who led the Northwoods League in hitting at .389, are regarded as top prospects by professional standards, but every player on the Eau Claire roster contributed to the team’s championship run.
“It’s a team game and we’ve been unbelievable all season,” said McGuiggan, who hit .278-7-27 during the regular season after going undrafted in June. “To come here and play well in the final game was a great experience. It’s something I’m not going to ever forget.”
The victory was even more special for fellow outfielder Nolan Fadness, a rising senior at Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who hit .305-2-20 on the season and drove in two runs in the deciding game. Fadness grew up in Eau Claire, and began watching Express games while in high school.
“To bring a championship to Eau Claire is just awesome, especially growing up here,” he said. “To say that I got to end it on top is pretty special, and it’s just been a great ride.”
Eau Clairecoach Dale Varsho, a year-round resident of the city and the franchise’s only coach since the Express was granted a Northwoods League franchise in 2005, was even more emphatic, that this was a special summer-league club.
“It’s a very special year because they all get along,” Varsho said. “They believed in one another, they loved being around one another, loved coming to the ball park. And that’s what it’s all about.”
Eau Claire had never won a Northwoods League championship in its six-year existence, but enjoyed another special moment in 1994, when a bronze status of “Hank Aaron At Bat” was unveiled at Eau Claire’s historic Carson Park (now in its 68th year), and 5,000 fans were on hand for the unveiling.
Aaron later acknowledged that the ceremony was one of the highlights of his career.
“A lot of things happened to me in my 23 years as a ballplayer,” Aaron said in the book, ‘A Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball, “but nothing touched me more than that day in Eau Claire.”
In 1952, as an 18-year-old, cross-hand hitting shortstop from Alabama, Aaron quit high school and signed on with the traveling Indianapolis Clowns. In May of that year, his contract was purchased by the National League’s Boston Braves, who coincidentally would move to Milwaukee(three hours from Eau Claire) a year later. Aaron earned Rookie of the Year honors for the Eau Claire Bears, hitting .336 with nine homers in the then Class C Northern League, and two years later was playing in the big leagues for the Milwaukee Braves.
From 1947 to 1962, Eau Claire was a Braves farm club. In its final year with a pro club, it won a Northern League title. Its next title came on Sunday, 48 years later.
Eau Claire’s No. 1 ranking was facilitated by the demise of the two teams ahead of it in the PG CrossChecker weekly top 30 rankings. The Cape Cod League’s Yarmouth Red Sox were No. 1 but lost to Cotuit in the third and deciding game of the Cape playoffs, while the No. 2 Santa Barbara Foresters of the California Collegiate League did not win the National Baseball Congress World Series, as expected, after winning the event twice in recent years.
The Prospect League’s Chillicothe Paints, meanwhile, were primed to move into the top spot after rolling through regular-season play and capturing that league’s championship, but Eau Claire made that a moot point by winning both rounds of the Northwoods League playoffs, although it was stretched to a third and deciding game on both occasions.
Eau Claire finished at No. 1,Chillicothe at No. 2. For a complete list of PG CrossChecker’s final top 30, click here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the next 2-3 weeks, PG CrossChecker will begin unveiling its lists of the top professional prospects in more than 20 summer college leagues. We’ll provide raw lists and brief scouting bios on each player initially, and then more comprehensive scouting reports and expanded league overviews thereafter.