Arkansas Travelers
The Arkansas Travelers are a minor league baseball team located in North Little Rock, AR, east of the Broadway Bridge. The Travelers are labeled within the Texas League, a minor league division that is made up eight other minor league teams, and played their games at the Ray Winder Field in Little Rock from the ballpark’s opening in 1963 until recently in 2007 when the team moved to a new stadium in North Little Rock called Dickey-Stephens Park. The city of North Little Rock paid for Dickey-Stephens Park by a voter-approved one-cent sales tax with the help of a partnership by the Travelers and Little Rock financier Warren Stephens. Since the stadium’s opening, the Tulsa Drillers’ batting coach Mike Coolbaugh was killed by a stray line drive to the neck.
The Travelers were inducted as a professional baseball team in 1895. The Travelers were the first professional sports team to be named after a state rather than a city, as they were renamed from the Little Rock Travelers to the Arkansas Travelers in 1957. The team is ranked in the AA baseball category, which is a step above a Farm Team, one step below AAA, and two steps below major league baseball. The Arkansas Travelers are currently under the affiliation of the major league baseball team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (set in 2001), and were previously under the St. Louis Cardinals (from 1966-2000) and the Philadelphia Phillies for a short period of time (1963-1965). The team has won League titles in 1971, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1989, 2001, and 2005.
