Ottawa Athletics
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Ottawa Athletics 1952–1954 Ottawa, Ontario |
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Previous parks
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Lansdowne Park |
The Ottawa Athletics (also known as the Ottawa A's) were a professional minor-league baseball team based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, that operated from 1952–54. The team played at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa and was a member of the Triple-A International League.
Triple-A baseball first came to Ottawa in 1951, when the former Jersey City Giants (1937–50) relocated to Canada's capital because of poor attendance. Ottawa had most recently hosted the Nationals and the Senators of the Class C Border League from 1947–50, leading that league in attendance for three of its four seasons and making the playoffs each year.
The 1951 Ottawa Giants were one of two Triple-A affiliates of the New York Giants of Major League Baseball (the other was the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association). But the Ottawa Giants would play only one season. In the autumn of 1951, their parent club decided to field only one top-level minor-league team in 1952, the Millers, and they abandoned Ottawa. The Philadelphia Athletics, who had no Triple-A affiliate in 1951, replaced the Giants and the Ottawa team was renamed.
The 1952 season saw Ottawa's attendance (over 153,000 fans) increase by 31 percent over the 1951 Giants', but the A's finished in seventh place in the eight-team IL. Attendance held steady in 1953 for a sixth-place team, but when the 1954 Ottawa A's plunged into the league's basement, attendance also plummeted to a league-worst 94,000 fans. The Athletics' record over their three years in Ottawa was a poor 194–264 (.424).
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