The San Antonio Missions are a Minor League Baseball team based in San Antonio, Texas. The Missions compete in the Texas League as the Double-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres. The team plays its home games at Nelson W. Wolff Municipal Stadium, which opened in 1994 and seats over 6,200 people with a total capacity of over 9,000. The Missions are named for the Spanish missions around which the city was founded.
San Antonio was home for one of the charter members of the Texas League back in 1888. Since that inaugural season the town has hosted a number of Texas League franchises, most of them using the Missions moniker. Baseball was absent only a few of the early years (1889-1891,1893–1894, 1900–1902) and again when World War II occupied most would-be ballplayers between 1943 and 1945. Initially the team went by the names “Missionaries”, “Gentlemen”, and “Bronchos”—a Spanish twist on the name “Broncos”. During these years, nearly 250 players reached the major leagues.
The current Missions moniker was coined with the team’s first major league affiliation, a partnership with the St. Louis Browns. They remained affiliated with the Browns through the Texas League’s temporary demise after the 1942 season due to World War II. With the return of peace, they reaffiliated with the Browns, a partnership that continued in 1954 when they became the Baltimore Orioles. This affiliation lasted until 1959, when they struck up a partnership with the Chicago Cubs. While with the Browns/Orioles, the team saw well over 100 players reach the Major League Baseball, including Hall-of-Famers Willard Brown (1956) and Brooks Robinson (1956–1957).
The Missions won the Dixie Series, a postseason interleague championship between the champions of the Southern Association and the Texas League, in 1950, defeating the Nashville Vols, 4–3, in the best-of-seven series.[2] The Missions won the Pan American Series a postseason interleague championship between the champions of the Mexican League and Texas League, in 1961 defeaeating the Veracruz Aguilas 4–2 in the best of seven series.(Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, Third Edition, 2007, Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, editors.) The Missions name was used for the teams affiliated with the Cubs, through 1962. In just four years in the Cubs’ system, more than 50 alumni reached the major leagues—including future Hall of Famers Ron Santo (1959) and Billy Williams (1959).
The Missions changed their name to the Bullets in 1963, when the team joined the new Houston Colt .45s organization. The idea behind the name was that the team’s prospects would be the “bullets to the gun” of the .45s team. The Bullets boasted 30 prospects that would go on to see time in Major League Baseball, including Hall-of-Famer Joe Morgan and two-time National League All-Star Jerry Grote.
In 1965, the San Antonio franchise moved to Amarillo. Three years later, in 1968, baseball returned to San Antonio, again taking on the Missions name, as part of an expansion of the Texas League. Again playing as a Cubs affiliate, another 42 future big leaguers took the field over a four-year stretch. After the 1971 season, the team packed up again and moved to Midland, where they continued as the Midland Cubs.
In 1972, another ownership group brought baseball into town to replace the group that left to Midland, and brought with it an affiliation with the Milwaukee Brewers, just two years removed from their move to Wisconsin from Seattle. With the affiliation change to the Brewers, the franchise took the parent club’s nickname—which it kept despite changes in affiliation to the Cleveland Indians (1973–1975) and Texas Rangers (1976). The Brewers nickname fit the city almost as well as it fit their single-season affiliate in Milwaukee, being the home of the Pearl Brewing Company.
The future major league players continued to pour onto the field through the affiliation changes, and more than 30 San Antonio Brewers made it to the top. Among them was Hall-of-Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley, an Indians farmhand who tore through the Texas League in 1974.
