Miner Leagues: discovering a hidden baseball treasure in Madrid, New Mexico

MADRID, New Mexico — The juniper trees huddle under a thin dusting of new snow, and the two-lane road southwest of Santa Fe does its best to lean out of sight, first to the left, then to the right, then to the left again. The sway sway sway repeats as it pulls you past a prison, then a horse hospital, then into the desert’s rhythm as the drive becomes a waltz set to a phantom saloon piano and a plaintive harmonica, awakening the west measure-by-measure until it is old again and young again. The cars seem a modern anachronism, their engines thundering with too many horses to allow their drivers to inhale the faint ghosts of a thousand campfires and hardened faces and rifles kept near.

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And then, just when you wonder if you might be disappearing into a Coen brothers movie, the Turquoise Trail sways to the left, slows your dance, looks you square in the eye, slowly reaches into a coal mine and reveals… a diamond.

Nestled in the foothills of the Ortiz Mountains — roughly one-third of the way from Santa Fe to Albuquerque — Madrid, New Mexico is a living storybook of coal mining, ghosts, legends of Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, the Manhattan Project, World War II, progress, abandonment, revitalization, hippies, art, and small-town America. But at the center of just about all of it, there is baseball.

To understand Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid), it helps to know how it came to be: in the wild-west late-19th-century heyday of coal mining, the Cerrillos Coal and Iron Company outlasted (or out-litigated) all other claimants to a unique coal mine that produced both the more common Bituminous and the more pure Anthracite coal1. They brought in pre-fabricated houses from as far away as Kansas, set up a company store, and started hiring miners.

As for when Madrid officially became Madrid, reports vary. Some point to 1892, the same year that Ellis Island, General Electric, The Pledge of Allegiance and The Nutcracker came into existence, and the Dalton Gang, Walt Whitman and Robert Ford made their exits. Others put it as late as 1895, when George Herman “Babe” Ruth and John Wesley Hardin swapped places on this mortal coil. Whatever the case, somewhere between the wild west and the white lines, the non-incorporated company-owned town of Madrid was officially founded.

As the mine flourished, so the town grew. After a 1906 fire, ownership of the mine (and by extension, the town) was transferred to the similarly-named Albuquerque and Cerrillos Coal Company, who named Oscar Huber as Superintendent of both company and town. As such, it was his job to ensure that the employees remained — at least by the standards of the time — happy and productive (lest they unionize). After all, life in a coal mine was grueling and perilous, especially around the turn of the 20th century. For one example, consider this method of keeping employee records: at the end of each workday, every miner would place his identification tag on a hook board. If any tags were missing, the worker was presumed dead, and no search team would be sent to retrieve them.

It was under these circumstances that Huber happened upon a plan that he hoped would help boost morale: he would capitalize on the growing popularity of baseball and start a company baseball team. Huber was far from the first to organize an amateur team in the region — the Albuquerque Browns had come into existence as far back as 1892, and in fact an earlier short-lived team called the Madrid Blues had come and gone around the turn of the century — but by 1920, as Ruth was breaking a single-season record by hitting 54 home runs, and the office of the Commissioner was put into place to deal with the previous season’s “Black Sox” scandal, the Madrid Miners began playing games against other regional teams such as the Albuquerque Maroons, Albuquerque Dons, Santa Fe Saints, Santa Fe Bookmakers and Stationers, Bernalillo Lumberjacks, and the Isleta Indians. Many of the teams they played were also company teams; the Bookmakers and Stationers, for example, were sponsored by “a local book and stationery supply store”2.

As the team (and the sport) grew in popularity, Huber decided it was time to build a baseball stadium for his team of workers. More accurately, he decided to have the workers build a baseball stadium for themselves (since all the labor was done by local resident-employees of the mine). But — with a cheap source of electricity being pulled forth daily from the mountain — this park would boast something that no other park west of the Mississippi3 had ever seen: lights. When the Miners played their first night game in 1928, they beat Major League Baseball to the punch by seven years4.

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Of course, most of the games were still played during the day, usually on Sunday afternoons. In 1925, the Central New Mexico League was formed, and by 1928 (the year that the ballpark in Madrid was built), the league began to allow company teams to compete5. With a pennant now on the line, teams that had previously been made up solely of company employees began to see new names on the rosters, “ringers” who were given jobs that did not require them to work underground. One such player was pitcher Emmett “Chief” Bowles.

Much of Bowles’ life is a mystery, but this much we know: he was born in 1898 in Wanette, Oklahoma, and 24 years later — on September 12th, 1922 — he made his big-league debut for the Chicago White Sox, facing the Cleveland Indians.

With names like Amos Strunk, Bibb Falk, and Hall-of-Famers Harry Hooper and Eddie Collins playing behind him, Bowles entered the game in the third inning after starter Larry Duff lasted just two innings. Bowles faced six batters, gave up three runs on two hits and a walk, and never played big-league ball again, sporting a career ERA of 27.00

That didn’t matter much to the Miners or the denizens of Madrid, however. Not only was Bowles a real-life big-leaguer, he was also the Miners’ star pitcher. Led by Bowles and Harry “Pop” Stowers, (who led the league in hitting on multiple occasions), Madrid won league championships in 1928, 1931 and 1933, only losing the 1930 championship when four errors befell their defense. (No championships were awarded in 1929 or 1932 due to conflicts between teams.)

Newspaper clippings from 1928-1934 provided by Melinda Bon’ewell

Madrid never won another pennant after 1933, but for over a decade — from the early 20s through the mid-to-late-1930s — baseball was the biggest draw in town (except, of course, for Christmas6). So well-known were the Miners that they were able to lure in such barnstorming stalwarts as the House of David and the Zulu Cannibal Giants. Most Sunday afternoons, the locals say, nearly the entire town — by this time numbering over 3,000 — would show up to watch their beloved Miners take on league rivals (or a barnstorming troupe).

The legends are multitude when it comes to the 1930s in Madrid, New Mexico. Some say that the Brooklyn Dodgers and St. Louis Browns made trips through Madrid for exhibition games, though the lack of evidence makes such claims dubious. Nevertheless, as a mixture of legend and history bleeds into one tradition, this much is indubitably true: the Madrid Miners were an institution. They were much of a town’s fabric of identity for an era, drawing crowds from around the state to watch their local heroes battle between the white lines for bragging rights and pride.

Of course, if the Madrid Miners had continued to be the talk of central New Mexico, this would be a much different story. Instead, as with many stories that revolve around coal mines, this one took a hard turn.

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Emmett “Chief” Bowles played his final game for the Miners in 1938 and faded back into obscurity until his death in 1957. By 1939, the Central New Mexico League was disbanded for good. The United States was already decreasing its dependence on coal, and with the industry beginning to destabilize and the threat of war looming, many miners transitioned from the workforce to the military. Madrid’s once-nationally-famous Christmas lights (some claim that Walt Disney’s visit in 1936 inspired his design of Disneyland) went dark after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and in 1944 — on Christmas Day, no less — the town’s local tavern burned to the ground. After the war’s end, Madrid locals who survived returned home to find the town’s population decimated. The Miners continued to play in sandlot leagues through the 1940s, but without the fanfare of their heyday. They played their final game in 1950.

By then, Madrid was quickly becoming a ghost town (literally, if you ask the locals, all of whom seem to have some ghost story or another). By 1954, with the population having dropped from roughly 3,500 to under 200, the mine ceased operations, and the entire town was put up for sale by the mining company for $250,000.

There were no takers.

By the 1960s, just five businesses remained open, and with no prospects for revival on the horizon, the town was sold, not as a monolith but piecemeal to anyone who would move to the little village. Houses were sold for $1,500-2,000 apiece, and the buyers were, by and large, artists and free-spirited hippies. Slowly but surely, the town that once relied on coal (and was rumored to have been the source of materials for The Manhattan Project in nearby Los Alamos) was increasingly inhabited by a population of peace-loving bohemians.

Today, the small town — still populated by only around 220 people — relies on tourism and its reputation as a well-kept Hollywood secret. Major motion picture rap parties still come to Madrid once in awhile, and a handful of well-known films have been shot in the little town, including Wild Hogs, Longmire, and Beer for my Horses. There’s a mercantile, a handful of restaurants, a local radio station and some art boutiques. The Old Coal Town Museum contains artifacts from the mines, the miners (both the team and the underground employees), and Thomas Edison, who purportedly spent a fair amount of time in and around Madrid working on an ultimately unsuccessful gold mining project.

But it’s not only the people that have returned.

Behind the beer taps at the Mine Shaft Tavern rests a heavy wooden plaque. It’s not a 1930s pennant from a competitive amateur baseball league, but some semblance of the game has returned to Madrid. Oscar Huber Memorial Park — recipient of a series of renovations beginning in 2010 — is back in use, home to two softball teams: a men’s team and a co-ed team, both named the Miners (though they started as the Maulers). Each year, they play a Memorial Day game against the East Mountain Riff Raff, their most bitter (and only) rivals.

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In 2018, after a 35-year-long losing streak, the Miners defeated the Riff Raff and brought the “Braggin’ Rights” trophy back to the domain of Oscar Huber, Emmett “Chief” Bowles and the still-unincorporated town of Madrid, New Mexico: one of baseball’s hidden treasures.

1 For the curious: Bituminous coal is the softer and more common type of coal. It has traditionally been used in the production of electricity. Anthracite coal is purer (and predictably, rarer), and has been used primarily for heating.

2 “The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2005-2006” Margaret Frisbee, Jason Strykowski, 2007, McFarland and Company

3 The clause “…west of the Mississippi” is important, since the first official game played under lights occurred decades before, all the way back in 1880 in Hull, Massachusetts. 

4 When was the first MLB game under lights? May 24th, 1935, when the Cincinnati Reds hosted the Philadelphia Phillies at Crosley Field. 

5 “New Mexico Baseball: Miners, Outlaws, Indians, and Isotopes”, L.M. Sutter, McFarland and Company 

6 The ballpark, historic as it was, wasn’t the Madrid’s first grandiose show of electricity. Beginning in 1922, Madrid began lighting up the entire city for what they called “Toy Town”. So elaborate and grandiose was the display that locals now relate a broad number of oral-tradition legends, including stories of TWA re-routing flights to passengers could see the lights, and Walt Disney himself being inspired by Toyland to create Disneyland. 

Special thanks to Melinda Bon’ewell, Lynne Welty, and the staff and patrons of the Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid for all their help researching the history of the town and team. Thanks also to Randy Jeffers and the Dawkins family, who tipped me off to the existence of Madrid and the Miners. 

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