Three women who shaped Cactus League legacy
by Jim Ripley, East Valley Tribune
It is the boys of summer who take the field on opening day of the Cactus League season on Wednesday.
But the Cactus League Experience is very much a story about the ladies.
There is the story of 88-year-old Rose Mofford, who is hailed as the savior of the Cactus League for preventing an exodus of teams from Arizona to Florida while she was the state’s governor in the late 1980s.
There is the story of 103-year-old Alice Sliger, whose collection of memories of baseball greats who soothed their muscles at her hot mineral springs baths in East Mesa include Ty Cobb and Ernie Banks.
There is the story of 41-year-old Lisa Anderson, executive director of the Mesa Historical Museum, who came up with the idea of capturing the history of the Cactus League and in doing so has put the city of Mesa in the spotlight of Major League Baseball at a critical juncture.
The three women and their stories converged last Thursday night before 250 guests at the opening reception for Play Ball: The Cactus League Experience.
The reception hosted by Mesa Mayor Scott Smith took place at the Arizona Museum for Youth in downtown Mesa where the exhibit is now on display until a permanent site can be identified.
Mofford was at the top of her game at the reception where she was honored by Smith for her “crusade to prevent teams from leaving our state for Florida” and became the first official visitor to see this year’s expanded exhibition.
In her remarks, she wryly told of the call she received from Smith some weeks ago asking for her help to keep the Cubs in Mesa.
She said she at first thought the call was a prank.
“Nobody from Mesa had ever asked me for anything,” said the Phoenix Democrat.
But once she determined the voice on the phone did indeed belong to the mayor of Mesa, she joined his cause.
Memorabilia from Mofford’s critical role in the history of the Cactus League are on display at the Cactus League Experience.
So, too, is a collection from Buckhorn Mineral Baths and Wildlife Museum and motel in East Mesa.
Every February for 25 years players for the San Francisco/New York Giants would arrive at the baths to get their bodies ready for the Cactus League season and the long summer ahead.
After most people had gone home Thursday night, I found Alice Sliger parked in her wheel chair at the Buckhorn Baths collection within the Cactus League exhibition. Sliger along with husband Ted owned and ran the motel.
While her voice will barely rise above a whisper, the centenarian’s memory of those days from 1947 to 1972 is sound.
She pointed with a trembling finger to a massage bed where an aging Ty Cobb would get rubdowns. “He was very feeble but he loved his baths,” she said.
In the background most of the evening was another beaming first lady of spring baseball, Lisa Anderson.
Anderson was publicly acknowledged only once during the evening, but ”without her there would not be a Playball: The Cactus League Experience,” said Robert Johnson, a public policy consultant for Phoenix-based Highground and another central figure in the development of the Cactus League exhibition.
Anderson came up with the idea of developing an exhibition on the history of the Cactus League in the winter of 2007-2008. She took the idea to Cactus League President Robert Brinton and then to Mesa City Councilman Dennis Kavanagh.
A team that included Johnson quickly coalesced around the idea and within a year the first display went up at the museum’s Lehi facility on Horne Road.
“This exhibition is the direct result of Lisa’s populist approach to the presentation of history,” Johnson said. “She has a keen sense of what people want to learn about history and knows how to turn that knowledge into reality.”
It was evident Thursday night that Anderson had hit it downtown as 250 movers and shakers, including
Laurel Prieb, vice president of western operations and special projects for Major League Baseball, gathered for the exhibition’s 2010 opening.
On Friday morning, Anderson awoke to a story about the event on Major League Baseball’s Web site.
The Cubs had put Mesa on the baseball map, but it is becoming clear that a museum director’s brainstorm is stamping the city’s name in bold.
(Full disclosure, the writer is on the board of the Mesa Historical Museum, joining it last June long after the Cactus League exhibition was conceived and put on display.)
