Consider, for a moment, the greatest baseball player to ever represent the town of Patagonia.
Seventeen seasons in the major leagues. Two hundred and fifty-two career home runs. Five appearances in the Major League All-Star Game.
That would be the late Bobby Murcer. The same Bobby Murcer who starred for the New York Yankees and was the best hitter in the American League in 1971. Imagine, just a few years earlier, Murcer on a southeastern Arizona ballfield with a bunch of Patagonia locals.
The locals had been playing ball and representing the town for decades in makeshift games against other neighboring towns and military teams.
Baseball’s popularity in the mining camps dated back to the late 1800s, a welcome diversion from the tunnels, the saloons, and the gambling halls for the rambunctious inhabitants. The region’s bigger camps—Jerome, Globe, Morenci, Clifton, Bisbee—soon had actual ballparks, complete with bleachers. So it’s no surprise that baseball would also establish a foothold in a mining town like Patagonia.
“It was the only entertainment,” said Alex Quiroga, who began playing for the locals in the 1950s. “There was no other thing to do but play ball or go get drunk on Saturday and Sunday.”
There was no stadium, but there was a giant mesquite tree near the current high school where a backstop was erected and became the site of intense games between the Patagonia Miners and other nearby teams from both sides of the border.
“We played all over,” Quiroga recalled. “A lot in Sonora. Cananea, Naco, Nogales, Bisbee, Willcox, Benson, Tombstone, Tucson, Douglas. The mine sponsored the team, gave us money for travel, to buy equipment. We had a lot of good, good ballplayers. Just a lot of good high school players who ended up working in the mines.”
The weekend games became a centerpiece of the town’s entertainment and a source of pride. Townsfolk would park their cars around the perimeter of the field or walk over to watch, cheer and maybe even heckle a little.
When the mining operation shut down in 1957, the games continued. It was still one of the few sources of entertainment in town. But without the mines to foot the bill, the players themselves stepped up to keep it going, simply for the love of the game.
“Nick Laguna, he was the most instrumental person that kept the team together,” said Gilbert Quiroga, Alex’s younger brother. “He just loved to play ball and was one hell of a second baseman.”
Most of the top players were locals who had grown up playing ball in Patagonia: Laguna, Johnny Urias, Alex Quiroga, Ralph Padilla, Ernie Majalca, Roy Walsh. But these were competitive games, and the team was not above bringing in some outside help – a.k.a. ringers.
Gilbert Quiroga gets credit for bringing Murcer into the fold.
In the late ‘60s, he was working as a swimming instructor at Fort Huachuca and was introduced to a young sergeant whose baseball career had been interrupted by a two-year military hitch.
“I got to talking to him, and I told him about our baseball team,” Quiroga said. “He asked ‘is it organized, is it cool for anybody to play,’ and I said yeah, you can play for us. Willie (Sanchez, the team manager) said put him on, put him on. So he came to play with us in several of those games, and he hit the ball out of the park every time.
“We didn’t tell the other team. We’d just tell them he was one of our players. Slowly but surely people began to realize what we were doing and we had to stop.”
Not all the ringers were of quite that caliber.
Albert “Punky” Gastelum, a pitcher from Tumacacori, played one season on an Arizona State freshman team that featured future major leaguer All-Star Sal Bando. Punky was pitching for Tubac’s team and got tired of losing all the time to Patagonia, so he switched sides and became Patagonia’s ace pitcher.
“I could throw a fastball, change-up, slider, the whole thing, keep them guessing” Gastelum said. “But you couldn’t just throw everyone over the plate. You had to suck them in.”
Before Alex Quiroga became one of the team’s best players, he was its 12-year-old batboy.
“Some of the miners drank too much on Saturday nights, some of them wouldn’t show up because they were too hungover and there weren’t enough players, so they put me in,” he said.
As Quiroga matured, he grew into much more than a hangover alternate, eventually attracting the attention of a scout from the Philadelphia Phillies.
“It was either get married or play baseball (professionally),” he said. “The wife won out.”
The baseball continued, of course, only on a smaller stage.
Patagonia and its opponents would often trade off as host teams – a double-header one weekend in town, the next on the road. Between games, a shared meal.
“The players and all of their wives got together and had a cookout of some kind,” Gilbert Quiroga said. “Menudo, tamales, sometimes barbecued chicken, steak, whatever. The teams would feed each other.”
There might also be a little beer consumption to wash it all down.
“If we went to the river, we’d take a couple of kegs,” Gilbert said. “By the time of the second game, we were all best buddies.”
The games continued into the mid ‘70s, until they stopped. Times were changing. Television became commonplace. The players aged.
“The younger guys were more interested in other things. You couldn’t just pick somebody out of town and say let’s play ball,” Alex Quiroga said. “I played up until I was 50 years old. We got too old to run.”