Tonight, the Traverse City Beach Bums hit their home field to take on the Washington Wild Things. This is the seventh season for TC’s Frontier League team. But did you know our fabulous frontiersmen aren’t TC baseball pioneers? Minor league baseball first caught on in the North before indoor plumbing and electricity.

By the late 1880s, teams were sprouting up all over northern Michigan, including the region’s first semi-professional team, the Traverse City Hustlers, and later, teams like the Corn Huskers, the Invincibles, and – buried deep in the belly of the History Center archives – there’s even a photograph of an unidentified all-woman’s team taken sometime around the turn of the last century.

By 1910, the Resorters, Traverse City’s first professional team debuted, and leading the team to victory was a man destined for the major league, Bundy “Bunny” Brief.

The son of Polish immigrants, Brief was born Anthony John Grzeszkowski. He joined the Traverse City Resorters in 1910 at age 17.

Two years after joining TC’s team, the regional star skipped the minors and slid into his first major league contract with the St. Louis Browns. However, leaving home proved difficult for the TC native, who made it as far as Grand Rapids before homesickness hit and he was compelled turn around and head right back to TC.

Later that fall – this time accompanied by his brother – Brief finally landed in St. Louis.

Brief played for the Browns until 1915, when he was traded to the Chicago White Sox. In 1917, he played a single season for the Pittsburgh Pirates before moving to the minors.

The step down proved to be Brief’s climb into the spotlight. He was a star player with the Kansas City Blues and the Milwaukee Brewers, an American minor league team pre-dating the present-day major league Brewers. Brief’s best season ever: 1921, when he hit 42 home runs and had 191 RBIs for Kansas City.

Retiring in 1928, the first baseman moved back to his home sweet home TC, where he was honored by Northern Creamery, then on Front Street. The ice cream shop celebrated the ball player with a treat dubbed the “Homerun Bundy” – a singular scoop of vanilla ice cream covered in chocolate and served on a stick.

Brief’s death in 1963 saddened TC, but the shockwaves reached all the way to Milwaukee, where a writer for the city’s Sentinel paper reminisced: “The Traverse City, Michigan slugger was the most deservedly popular player of the American Association. He was the Babe Ruth of the minors.”

It was a fitting tribute; Brief’s career batting average was .331, just shy of Babe Ruth’s .342. To date, “Bunny” holds the all-time record for homers in the American Association and is tied at eight with Den Guettler for the most minor league home run crowns. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.