Baseball Wiki
Register
Advertisement
Huntsville Stars

Team Logo

The Huntsville Stars were a Southern League team that served, at different times, as the Double-A affiliate of the Oakland Athletics and Milwaukee Brewers. The Stars played their home games at Joe Davis Stadium in Huntsville, Alabama.

The Huntsville Stars emerged in 1984 as the result of an attempted team swap by minor league team owner Larry Schmittou. At the time, he owned both the AAA Evansville Triplets of the American Association, and the AA Nashville Sounds of the Southern League. Schmittou saw Nashville as a more promising market, and wanted to swap the two affiliates, moving the AAA team to Nashville and the AA team to Evansville. The city of Nashville readily agreed to build a new ballpark for the Triplets, but Evansville balked at having to spend money on ballpark improvements to drop down a level. Schmittou, trying to find a home for the Southern League team, contacted Mayor Joe W. Davis of Huntsville, Alabama, which at the time had no professional baseball of any kind. Davis convinced the city fathers to build a new ballpark, Joe Davis Stadium, which opened in 1985. With the AAA team taking the Sounds name, the AA team was christened the Huntsville Stars, in honor of Huntsville's history as an aerospace hub. Schmittou named retired player Don Mincher, a Huntsville resident, as the general manager, and the team became an affiliate of the Oakland Athletics.

The Stars played their first season in 1985. Athletics had a deep crop of prospects at the time, and the team won the Southern League championship that year, which helped ensure the team's long-term success. Well-know A's such as Tim Belcher, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Terry Steinbach, David Veres and Walt Weiss came up through Huntsville between 1985 and 1990. The team won a second championship in 1994, but as the decade went on, the Stars ownership (by now headed by Mincher) grew frustrated with the A's organization. At the end of the 1998 season, the Stars and A's parted ways, and the Stars affiliated themselves with the Milwaukee Brewers.

In 2000, Mincher resigned his position with the Stars in order to take the role of President of the Southern League. He found new ownership, who promised to keep the team in Huntsville. The team initially did well with the Brewers, winning the championship in 2001 and bringing up players such as Hideo Nomo, John Axford, Derek Lee and J.J. Hardy. However, Joe Davis Stadium was showing its age and becoming unpopular with fans. In the latter part of the decade, ownership drastically cut the promotions and advertising budget, and this combined with the poor state of the Brewers' farm system at the time, lost fan interest. Further, growth patterns in Huntsville had shifted. The city studied the idea of building a downtown ballpark and found it cost-prohibitive, so ownership started looking for new owners to move the team. They found those new owners at the end of the 2013 season, and it was announced that the team would move to Biloxi, Mississippi, and become the Biloxi Shuckers.

Thus, 2014 was scheduled to be the Stars' last season in Huntsville. As it turned out, the new ballpark in Biloxi was not ready by the start of the 2015 season, so the Shuckers played 15 games in Huntsville as the "home" team, but in Shuckers uniforms. The last such game was on May 25, against the Birmingham Barons.

Advertisement