Each year, the Pirates hit the road for spring training in Florida. It’s an annual rite that dates to the 1940s. But the Sunshine State wasn’t always where the Buccos got into shape for the major league season — between 1889 and 1923, the Pirates and their predecessor, the Alleghenies, trained multiple times in Hot Springs, Ark. So did Pittsburgh’s Negro League teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays.
“Pittsburgh trained at the spa more than any other team,” says baseball historian Don Duren.
Dubbed the “Spa City,” Hot Springs is famous for its thermal waters, which sparked a robust tourism economy in the 19th century. Industrialists, artists, mobsters, and athletes regularly descended upon the small city in the Ouachita Mountains to enjoy the waters, golf, and gamble. Many well-heeled Pittsburghers spent their late winters in Hot Springs and summers in Atlantic City. Hot Springs was Las Vegas before there was a Las Vegas. There are strong historical ties, from professional sports to organized crime, connecting the Spa City with the Steel City.
Baseball in the Spa City
Hot Springs is the birthplace of spring training. In 1886, A.G. Spalding (founder of Spalding sporting goods) and Adrian “Cap” Anson brought the Chicago White Stockings (who later became the Cubs) to Hot Springs before baseball season began. It “was the perfect spot for the boys to sober up and work out,” explains narrator Billy Bob Thornton in 2016 documentary The First Boys of Summer.
There had been earlier, intermittent preseason barnstorming trips into the South by baseball players, but these weren’t organized. “They would come down there and play ball and try to get some teams to play so they could get some money to go back up the road,” says Duren in an interview from his Texas home. Duren, 86, grew up in Hot Springs and wrote Boiling Out at the Springs: A History of Major League Baseball Training at Hot Springs.
The White Stockings set a new pattern when they returned to Hot Springs in 1887. Other teams followed, and a new system was born. “They ran the mountains and took the baths and played a little baseball,” says Duren.
By 1910, most of the professional teams, including the Pirates, were training in Hot Springs. Honus Wagner, who played and coached basketball in the offseason, took the Hot Springs High School basketball team under his wing by becoming their coach. After learning that the team needed uniforms and gear, Wagner shipped uniforms (in Pirates colors), shoes, and balls from his Pittsburgh sporting goods store. The high school’s teams, the Hot Springs Trojans, continue to use the black and gold as their colors.
Owners and managers liked that Hot Springs offered rural seclusion and easy access to nature — it became the nation’s first federal reservation, a precursor to national parks, in 1832. Despite being illegal, casino gambling flourished there starting in the 1870s. When the White Stockings began training there, Hot Springs was a wide-open city stacked with casinos, brothels, and speakeasies.
By the turn of the 20th century, access to Hot Springs’ vice was as much of a determining factor for baseball players’ decisions to train there as the training facilities themselves. Babe Ruth loved Hot Springs.
“Ruth was a perpetual conventioneer on the prowl. I wish the teams still trained in places like that, where they’ve got brothels and horse racing and gambling and everything,” Ruth biographer Leigh Montvville told an interviewer in The First Boys of Summer. “He got into all of it. I think he just went crazy.”
A mob favorite
Racketeers also discovered Hot Springs, and they liked to travel there for spring training, too. Betting on baseball games added to the city’s appeal. The ball games complemented the Oaklawn Jockey Club’s racetrack. By the time nationwide Prohibition hit in 1920, Hot Springs had become the nation’s first sin city.
“Hot Springs really was one of those cities that personified the nexus between sports, politics, and the rackets,” says University of Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck, author of Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh and a biography of Steelers founder Art Rooney.
After sporadic visits before 1900, the Pirates trained in Hot Springs over two stretches, between 1901 and 1916 and again between 1920 and 1923. The second period coincided with the rise of one of Pittsburgh’s earliest racketeers, George Jaffe.
Jaffe owned Pittsburgh’s only burlesque venue, the Academy Theater. He and his brothers, Milt, Morris, and Joe, built a bootlegging and gambling empire in Pittsburgh. Starting in 1922, George Jaffe began racking up arrests for running a brothel in the downtown hotel he owned, and on gambling charges.
Steelers founder Art Rooney and gambler Jake Klein were among George Jaffe’s closest friends. The two regularly joined Jaffe on his annual pilgrimages to Hot Springs. Jaffe typically rented a railroad car and filled it with relatives and associates. Pittsburgh’s newspapers reported on Jaffe’s Hot Springs trips between the early 1920s and 1950s.
In Hot Springs, the Jaffes and their pals golfed and watched (and presumably bet on) horse races at the Oaklawn Jockey Club, and mugged it up at an amusement park called Happy Hollow. Photos taken there show the Jaffes, Klein, and Rooney posing for the camera in a fake speakeasy and staged rural “hillbilly” scenes. One photo with Klein and Rooney mirrors a similar one taken a few years later with Chicago mobster Al Capone in the same place.
The Jaffe bunch also played baseball in Hot Springs. In 1921, the Pittsburgh Post published a photo of Jaffe’s sandlot team, the Picaroons. They were, the paper wrote, “the unofficial advance guard of the Pirates.” The lineup included Jaffe and Klein.
Rooney’s ties to Hot Springs included a friendship with exiled New York mobster Owney Madden. After Madden moved to Hot Springs in 1935, he oversaw the local rackets for his New York partners, including Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
Hot Springs played a bit part in the 1932 kidnapping of Milt Jaffe. According to newspaper accounts, George Jaffe traveled to Hot Springs to pay a $30,000 ransom for his brother. The Jaffes, though, denied the kidnapping rumors and described the episode as an April fool’s prank. “George denies the whole story,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. “He went to Hot Springs, Ark., and met his brother, but it was his regular annual vacation trip there.”
Segregated spring
In the late 1920s, Negro League ball teams began training in Hot Springs. Both of Pittsburgh’s teams, the Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, were regulars there.
“In a way, it makes them big league,” says Ruck. “Their training and working out and playing in the same area where I believe major league squads are, I think, heightens that sense of their legitimacy.”
But Hot Springs was still the South, and it was rigidly segregated. “They had, I guess, a little town out here for them down on Malvern Avenue in Hot Springs and they had hotels down there,” says Duren. “They had bathhouses.”
The Grays, in 1930, were the first Pittsburgh Negro League team to train in Hot Springs. They joined the Kansas City Monarchs.
Two years later, in 1932, the Crawfords began a multi-year run in Hot Springs. It was the year after Crawford Grill owner Gus Greenlee bought the team. Greenlee was one of Pittsburgh’s and the nation’s leading Black organized crime figures. He got his start in bootlegging and graduated to numbers gambling. By the time he died in 1952, he and William “Woogie” Harris were among the leaders in an informal Black crime syndicate dubbed the National Brotherhood of Policy Kings.
Joe Tito, an Italian American bootlegger and gambler who later introduced Rolling Rock beer to Pittsburgh and beyond, was Greenlee’s Crawfords co-owner and partner in the Hill District’s Greenlee Field. Tito family photos from the early 1920s show Joe and his brothers enjoying themselves at Happy Hollow and other Hot Springs locations.
A yinzer legacy
Black and white teams continued to train in Hot Springs through the 1930s. By 1940, Florida and Arizona had replaced Hot Springs as major league baseball’s spring training mecca. The Depression economy played a part. The emergence of Las Vegas and Florida as leading tourist destinations also contributed to Spa City striking out and leaving the field.
Happy Hollow was replaced by a motel. There’s a parking lot where the field that Babe Ruth, in 1918, hit a 500-foot homerun. Some of the hotels and bathhouses Pittsburgh ballplayers and racketeers frequented are still there, including the Woodmen of the Union Bathhouse and Sanitarium, where Black visitors stayed, and the Arlington.
Hot Springs still boasts of the times that Honus Wagner, Satchel Paige, and Josh Gibson were part of the community, and there are still places where Pittsburgh history may be found in the Spa City. While those days of vice are in the past, the Arkansas hotspot started a baseball tradition that continues to this day.
Editor’s note: The historical marker photo above was miscredited in an earlier version of this story. It has been corrected above.
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
