Know Your Foe: The Boise Hawks

Welcome to Know Your Foe, your friendly fast facts to get to know the Ballers’ opponents at Raimondi Park this season.

Next up: The Boise Hawks! 

Their Season So Far:

The Hawks are 42-36 overall on the year and 12-18 in the second half, including dropping five of six last week to the High Wheelers. In the first half, they finished a strong third and just out of playoff position. They feature some of the league’s best offensive players: Taylor Darden (#38) has the highest average in the league accounting for most games played, Darden and Max Jung-Goldberg (#18) both have over 100 RBI, and Jung-Goldberg and Jake Hjelle (#8) are in the top-10 for homers. Noah Marcelo (#7) leads the entire league in stolen bases with 45. Darden in particular is scorching into Raimondi, coming off Pioneer League Hitter of the Week honors up in Marysville.

Charles Knowles/Shutterstock

Hometown: Boise, Idaho  

-              Boise city has a population of about 235,000 with a metro area around half a million. The name comes from the French boisé, or wooded, after French-Canadian trappers’ exclamations seeing woods after a long journey across the tree-optional plains.

-              For more than a hundred years, long before green was a thing, Boise has heated parts of the city with geothermal energy from hot springs underground.

-              The Big Idaho Potato Tour, now in its 13th year crossing the country carrying a 4-ton (sadly, not real) potato to events like the Kentucky Derby, Indy 500, American Idol, and National Memorial Day Parade, started in Boise. And yes, there’s a real-time tracker to keep up with its progress.

-              And not that they’re potato-crazy or anything, but on New Year’s Eve, Boiseans drop an LED-lit GlowTato above the assembled revelers.

-              Basque Boise: Turn-of-the-(previous)-century Basque immigrants worked as sheepherders in Idaho, and the city still hosts one of the largest populations outside Europe.

-              Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul is a Boise-area native; he had his wedding outside the city and has been—of course—a special guest for the Potato Drop.  

-              Parts of the Oregon Trail run through the area, though no word on how many of your family members died fording the river, from snakebite, or dysentery.  

Mascot:  Humphrey the Hawk!

-              Humphrey’s hawkishness pays tribute to the nearby Snake River Birds of Prey Conservation Area, one of the largest raptor habitats in the world. (Snakes not included.)

-              In one of those truly great minor league baseball stories, in 1989, the Hawks manager was ejected from a game and returned to the field in the Humphrey costume. He was suspended one game, but lives in glory forever. (Ok, maybe it’s not just minor league—do you remember Mets manager Bobby Valentine getting ejected and coming back to the dugout wearing glasses and a false mustache?)

Team History:

-              The Hawks are a proud and longstanding franchise in Boise. Beginning play in 1987, they’ve won six league championships and served as affiliates for the Rockies, Cubs, and Angels.

-              The Hawks play at Memorial Stadium in Garden City, just off the banks of the Boise River. Beloved in the community, they regularly lead or are near the top of the Pioneer League in attendance, both in total fans and game average.  

-              Current ballerific Baller Michael O’Hara played his first pro season with the Hawks last year.  

-              Before the Hawks, Boise hosted another Northwest League team, the Boise A’s (1975-6). The team played on a field managed by the school board, so beer sales were not allowed; a late August game in ’76 only drew 47 fans. The same year, some guy named Rickey Henderson, just out of Oakland Technical High School, started there for his first professional experience, hitting .340, stealing 29 bases, and playing third base. He did not make the season’s Northwest League All-Star Game. No word on whether he continued his career anywhere else.

Rickey’s ‘76 yearbook photo, the same year he played for the Boise A’s (no word, also, on where his baseball play went in the caption, or that extra e in his name)

Best Promos:

-              “Reverse the Curse” nights! In 2004, 2006, and 2012, the team, as an affiliate for the Cubs, tried to roust some good karma to reverse the longstanding World Series drought, including allowing real goats into the stadium (11 attended) and providing a Steve Bartman dunk tank (0 Bartmans attended).

-              Battle Beavers! The team rebranded for one game this June as the Boise Battle Beavers, commemorating a 1948 scheme to restore remote beaver populations… by parachuting them in from planes. And yes, the first parabeaver to make the fall was nicknamed Geronimo.

-              Cornhole Tournaments!

-              A bat-dog named Blitz, who “appears at every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday home games to collect the bats for the Hawks in the third and fourth innings.”

-              Fireworks nights and barks at the park! Both are fan favorites, and boy do the Hawks know it. They have TWELVE fireworks nights throughout the season, and every Wednesday, their faithful can bring their furry friends to the game.

What to Watch For:

-              I LOVE a team alter ego, and the Hawks have TWO. The Papas Fritas pay tribute to Idaho’s unchallenged supremacy as land of the potatoes as well as the MiLB’s Copa de la Diversión program, and the Baconators—in partnership with Wendy’s—make sure extra Baconators make their way into mouths if the team scores five or more runs.  

 Special thanks to Paige Plotzke, Marketing Manager for the Hawks