Pecky Rhoades, the founder of the Minneapolis Marines


From 1913-16, Henry Harrison “Pecky” Rhoades played professional baseball in the affiliated minor leagues. On Baseball Reference, he is referred to as Harry Rhoades, and for the most part, he's just another forgotten player from Minneapolis.

But did you know that without Pecky Rhoades, there might never have been a Minneapolis Marines football team in the National Football League? (The Marines played in the NFL from 1921-24 and from 1929-30 as the Red Jackets.) That's because in 1905, sixteen-year-old Pecky Rhoades decided to start a baseball team in south Minneapolis, and he named the team the Marines. That same year, some members of the Marines baseball team decided to start a football team, too. (Because rosters for the Marines are incomplete in 1905-06, it's not clear whether Pecky might have played football, too.) A few future NFL players played alongside Pecky on his Minneapolis Marines baseball team, which folded after eight seasons, one year after Rhoades left the Marines to play on a bigger stage. At that point, the Marine Athletic Club decided to focus entirely on football.

Read more in Mill City Scrum, the history of Minnesota's first team in the National Football League.

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