The Pioneer Baseball League is honoring a longtime manager and purveyor of the minor and independent baseball league.

The league will name its Executive of the Year award after Dave Baggott, longtime president and co-owner of the Ogden Raptors who began his involvement with the Pioneer League 40 years ago.

“It’s been a hell of a ride,” Baggott said in a news release from the league. “I’d be stupid to do anything else. I mean, who wouldn’t want to wake up and come to the ballpark every day?”

Baggott began as a player, quickly became a GM, and helped build the Raptors franchise that has led the PBL in attendance every season since 1997.

“He’s fan-friendly, community-oriented, passionate about the game and, above all, a prince of a human being,” Billings Mustangs owner Dave Heller said in the league’s statement. “There is no better advocate for and representative of Minor League Baseball than Dave Baggott.”

Baggott started in the Pioneer League as a player in Idaho Falls for the 1985 season and also played for the Salt Lake Trappers.

By 1989 — “in the oftentimes inconceivable twists and turns of baseball fate,” the league’s release reads — Baggott was general manager of the Trappers, where he twice won executive of the year honors.

When the Trappers moved to Pocatello, Idaho, in 1992 to clear the way for Salt Lake to take on a Triple-A team, Baggott and business partner John E. Lindquist hatched plans to buy the franchise.

By the 1994 season, the Ogden Raptors were born — independent for a short time, quickly affiliated with the Milwaukee Brewers and, by 1997, playing at Lindquist Field, which could rightly claim for decades one of the best parks in minor league baseball.

Ogden has led the league in attendance ever since — though it needs a push this week, the final week of the regular season, as Boise currently holds a lead of 53 fans per game over the Raptors for the 2024 season.

The Raptors host the Glacier Range Riders for games through Sunday at Lindquist Field.