Hartford Chiefs

The Hartford Chiefs was the final name of the American minor league baseball franchise representing Hartford, Connecticut, that played in the Eastern League (then Class A) between 1938 and 1952. The Hartford franchise was an affiliate of the Boston Braves for each of its 15 seasons. It played at Bulkeley Stadium, and was known as the Bees from 1938 to 1945.^[2] It was also called the Laurels due to reporting by The Hartford Times, the city's afternoon newspaper.^[3] The 1944 Hartford club was recognized as one of the 100 greatest minor league teams of all time.^[4] The team was renamed the "Chiefs" in 1946, five years after its parent club, known as the Boston Bees from 1936–1940, reverted to its previous identity, the Braves.

The Connecticut capital had been in organized baseball since the Hartford Dark Blues were a charter member of the National League in 1876–77. After those two years in Major League Baseball, Hartford was represented in eleven different minor leagues — including three earlier versions of the "Eastern League."^[5] When the Class B Northeastern League folded after the 1934 season during the depths of the Great Depression, Hartford was without professional baseball for three seasons. Then Hartford joined the Class A New York–Pennsylvania League. The arrival of franchises in Hartford and Trenton, New Jersey, caused the NYPL to change its identity to the Eastern League in 1938, with 2012 marking the 75th consecutive season the league has used the name.

The 1938 Laurels made the Eastern League playoffs and Hartford qualified for the postseason nine times in its 15-year history (including 1943–46 in succession), but the franchise never captured the league's playoff title. While the 1942 team included a future Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher, Warren Spahn, the Boston Bees/Braves of the era did not have an extensive player development system. Class A was prior to 1963 a higher-level circuit, close to today's Double-A ranking, and the Hartford franchise was the Braves' most advanced minor league affiliate through 1945. In 1946, however, the Braves began to build out their farm system, adding Triple-A and Double-A affiliates and expanding their presence in Classes B, C and D. They also worked with a second Class A farm club, the Denver Bears of the Western League, from 1949–51.

But after winning the 1948 National League pennant, the big-league Braves experienced a dramatic fall-off in attendance, and played their last season in Boston in 1952. The Hartford Chiefs did not survive them; the franchise was transferred to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, as an unaffiliated team for 1953. Meanwhile, the MLB Braves moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during spring training of 1953. They had two Class A affiliates that season: the Lincoln Chiefs of the Western League—inheritors of the Hartford team's nickname—and the Jacksonville Braves of the Sally League, whose star player in 1953 would be 19-year-old Henry Aaron.

In 2015, after more than six decades without a team in organized baseball, Hartford officials led by then-mayor Pedro Segarra proposed building a new baseball stadium (to be known as Dunkin' Donuts Park)^[6] in the city's North End to attract the nearby New Britain Rock Cats of the modern Double-A Eastern League. The renamed Hartford Yard Goats^[7] debuted in 2016 but played the entire season on the road — with some games moved to Norwich, 40 miles (64 km) to the southeast — because of construction delays. ^[8][9] Despite continued problems in completing the stadium, the team began play in Hartford's new ballpark in 2017.^[10]

• Baseball Reference