Whales Magnets
Description: The Chicago Whales only existed for three years, as part of the Federal League, a renegade baseball outfit that challenged the American and National leagues from 1913 to 1915, before abruptly going broke. The team is barely a footnote in baseball history, but it played an important role in Chicago history, because it brought the game to the North Side, which is why tens of thousands of Big Ten graduates live there today. The Whales were the first team to play baseball at the corner of Clark and Addison, and the first to win a championship there, in 1915 — 101 years before the Cubs did it. Yet I could find nothing commemorating them at Wrigley Field.
Description: The team began as the Taiyo Fishing Company, an amateur team currently affiliated with the Maruha Corporation. The team name was changed to the Taiyō Whales (大洋ホエールズ, Taiyō Hoeeruzu) shortly after the start of the 1950 season. The Whales received several veteran players from the Yomiuri Giants to compensate for their lack of players, but ended up in the bottom half of the standings each year. In 1951, there was talk of merging with the Hiroshima Carp, which had experienced serious financial problems but the merging never occurred due to massive protests from Hiroshima citizens.
