Why it matters
Big-league baseball has stayed two blocks from Old Town’s bars nearly every spring since 1956 because a club of businessmen made it their job. The Scottsdale Charros, founded in 1961, have hosted every major-league tenant of Scottsdale Stadium since the Boston Red Sox: the Cubs, the A’s and, since 1984, the San Francisco Giants, whose lease runs to 2044. The spring-training guide tells you how to enjoy the result; this page is about who built it.
The Charros turned hosting into giving. Money from the Charro Lodge, the advertising and the raffles goes out through the Charro Foundation to Scottsdale Unified students and teachers, youth sports and about a hundred local nonprofits, more than $21 million in all. Since 2021 the club has also run the Parada del Sol parade, which makes it keeper of both of Old Town’s founding rituals, the one on horseback and the one on grass.
Where to find it today
Scottsdale Stadium, 7408 East Osborn Road, every February and March; the Charro Lodge is the covered deck in right field, and on non-game days the left-field berm is a free public park. The office is at 4251 North Brown Avenue in Old Town. The Charros Carousel spins at McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park. Grants, scholarships and the parade entry form are at charros.com.
How it started
The stadium came first. Volunteers calling themselves the Scottsdale Baseball Club built a wooden ballpark at Osborn Road and what is now Drinkwater Boulevard in 1955, and the Baltimore Orioles opened there in March 1956. The Red Sox replaced them in 1959. What the town lacked was a standing organization to host a team; the Chamber of Commerce could not do it as a side project forever.
Phoenix had the answer: the Thunderbirds, a closed club of young executives who ran the Phoenix Open. On March 1, 1961, four men met in Rollie Foltman’s office. On April 6, nine of them, Pat O’Day and Dave Hallstrom among them, formally organized at the Hotel Valley Ho, the town’s most glamorous room, as a special activity affiliate of the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce; Dick Houseworth, the first treasurer, was the last surviving founder when PHOENIX magazine interviewed him at 83 in 2011. On May 10 they renamed themselves the Charros, Spanish for gentleman riders, under an insignia members call the screaming pheasant.
The founding document described “an organization of 30 active Scottsdale businessmen, all under the age of 45,” whose purpose was to promote Scottsdale through sports and cultural activities. The age ceiling, the cap, the self-selection and the lifetime status for those who aged out were all borrowed from the Thunderbirds. The club hosted the Red Sox the next spring, started a McDowells trail ride and an Old Timers Day brunch in 1962, and in January 1964 the IRS recognized it as a tax-exempt business league, the 501(c)(6) form it still holds.
The decisions that locked it in
The closed club, 1961. The alternative was the Chamber model, open to any dues-paying business. The Charros chose the Thunderbirds model, their strength and their recurring embarrassment. A small, hand-picked group of men who each put in about 250 volunteer hours a year can run a six-week event with no paid game-day staff. It can also stay, as the Charros have, entirely male for 65 years without ever adopting a rule that says so.
The Cubs, 1967. When the Red Sox left after 1965, the Charros went to Chicago. Mayor Bud Tims went with them to Wrigley Field in 1967 to welcome the Cubs, who stayed through 1978. The club learned its real product: not the stadium but the next tenant. The Oakland A’s followed, and then the Giants, who swapped parks with the A’s and moved over from Phoenix Municipal Stadium in 1984 (the Charros’ own history says 1982).
The foundation, 1985 to 1987. A business league’s donations are not tax-deductible, and ad hoc gifts do not build a program. The Charros created the Charro Foundation in 1985, incorporated it in 1986, and in spring 1987 handed the first Outstanding Student Scholarship Awards to a boy and a girl from each Scottsdale high school. The foundation turned a hospitality club into the city’s leading private funder of its public schools.
The stadium, 1989 to 1992. By 1989 the 3,000-seat wooden park was an embarrassment, and Giants owner Bob Lurie was telling anyone who would listen that he would not stay at Candlestick Park. On November 7, 1989, San Francisco voters rejected a downtown ballpark; the same night Scottsdale voters overwhelmingly approved an $8.4 million bond to build a modern one. HOK Sport built it in under a year for about $7 million, and it opened on March 12, 1992, in the last terms of Mayor Herb Drinkwater. The Charros got a stage worth hosting on and, in 1996, the Charro Lodge to host from. The city got the asset and the obligation: a $23.1 million renovation in 2006 that bought the Giants’ commitment through 2025, and a $50 million rebuild in 2019 to 2021, funded by up to $35 million in city hotel taxes and $15.1 million from the Giants, that extended the agreement to December 31, 2044.
The parade, 2021. The Scottsdale Jaycees had run the Parada del Sol since 1953 and disbanded in 2009; a volunteer nonprofit, Parada del Sol Inc., kept it going. When the pandemic cancelled the 2021 edition, the first cancellation in nearly seventy years, the Charros, who had ridden in the parade for most of its life, took over management. Their mission statement now ends with “preserving Scottsdale’s Western heritage,” a phrase the founders never used.
The years it nearly ended
The Charros never nearly dissolved, but twice their reason for existing nearly did. In 1966 the Red Sox left and the stadium had no major-league tenant; a club formed to host baseball with no baseball to host is a lunch group, and the Charros avoided that by recruiting the Cubs. In the late 1980s a 3,000-seat wooden grandstand was hosting a franchise whose owner was threatening to move the whole team. The 1989 bond saved the tenancy and fixed the Charros’ relationship with the city as licensee of a public building rather than owner of a private one; every stadium deal since has run through the city council.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1961 purpose was promotional: “promote the City of Scottsdale and its community through sports and cultural activities.” The 2026 purpose is philanthropic: youth sports, education, charity and Western heritage.
The record documents the steps between. The Charro Foundation made giving the stated point rather than the byproduct. The 1987 scholarships, 1993 educator awards and 1999 Future Teacher Scholarship aimed the giving at the Scottsdale Unified School District, still the main beneficiary. The 1996 Charro Lodge gave the foundation a predictable stream. The 2021 Parada takeover added heritage to the mission because the parade needed a keeper. The club’s constituency was in the room for each step: the school district as partner in the 2017 Coronado initiative, the city as landlord and co-signer of every stadium deal, the Giants as the tenant whose charities split the raffle. The Charros still host baseball to the town’s benefit; the benefit is now counted in scholarships rather than hotel nights. “We’re a much more evolved group,” board chairman Mark Stanton said in 2011.
Who the record leaves out
Women. The club has no bylaw barring women, and it has never voted one in. That is the finding of PHOENIX magazine in 2011 and of the East Valley Tribune in 2007, when a complaint by John Greco, a former interim city manager of Tempe, led the Scottsdale Human Relations Commission to ask whether a city that advertised its nondiscrimination policies should hold a 20-year contract with an all-male club using a taxpayer-built stadium. The commission recommended an ordinance in 2007; the council took no action. It recommended again in June 2014, and the council held a study session in March 2015. The Charros hired their first female executive director, Margaret Leichtfuss, in the summer of 2011. The club’s own history mentions none of this.
The taxpayers’ ledger. The city has put $8.4 million in 1989 bonds, $23.1 million in 2006 and up to $35 million in hotel taxes in 2019 into a stadium used for six weeks of ticketed baseball a year, with the Charros as operator. Residents who doubt the city’s economic-impact studies have had no study of their own. The 2025 opening of the left-field berm as a free day park is the first regular public use of the building outside ticketed events.
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. The Charros’ competitor and neighbor since 2011 is Salt River Fields, the Community’s own spring-training complex ten minutes east. Nothing in the Charros’ record discusses it, or the Community. The name and the gentleman-rider costume come from Mexican horse culture; the club’s documents do not say what it has done with or for Scottsdale’s Mexican-American families beyond scholarships at schools some of them attend.
What it didn’t have to become
The Charros did not have to become a foundation. For their first quarter century they were a hospitality committee with a trail ride, and most Cactus League boosters stayed that way and are forgotten. The 1985 decision to create a 501(c)(3), and the 1987 decision to aim it at the public schools, made the Charros a civic institution rather than a club, and no crisis forced either one.
Nor did they have to be the Thunderbirds in miniature. The founders could have organized as an open Chamber committee or a Jaycees-style chapter with a term limit. The gender question that has followed the club since 2007 might never have arisen, and the club might not have lasted either: the Jaycees, open and age-limited, disbanded in 2009, and it is the closed, lifetime-membership Charros who now run their parade. The model copied from Phoenix in 1961 is the reason the Charros are still here, and the reason they still answer the same question about who gets to belong.