Episode 05: History of the Gold Sox

In 2019, after a nearly 40-year absence, affiliated minor-league baseball returned to Amarillo with the debut of the Sod Poodles, a Class AA Padres affiliate who won the Texas League title and drew over 400,000 fans in their first season of play. (This despite a team name that infuriated many locals — reportedly it’s obscure pioneer slang for “prairie dogs.”) As Brian M. Ingrassia suggests, however, the Sod Poodles are likely to face some of the same challenges that faced the city’s first affiliated team, the Gold Sox, whose history serves as “a case study illustrating how minor-league ball often only tenuously thrived in a mid-sized city.” An associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University, Ingrassia tells this tale in “The Yellow City’s Tenuous Hold on the Gold Sox: Affiliated Texas League Baseball in Amarillo, 1959–1982,” forthcoming in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review. He joins Ryan on this episode to discuss the complex interplay between postwar urban development and minor-league baseball, as well as to share stories about the legendary players who have passed through Amarillo on their way to the majors. The interview also touches on the relationship between Ingrassia’s first book, The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (2012); his more recent research on baseball; and his current scholarly project, a book-length examination of auto racing, urban planning, and the “good roads” movement of the early 1900s.