Professional baseball in Colorado Springs is no more.

The final domino fell with KRDO-TV confirming the Rocky Mountain Vibes would cease operations, with owner D.G. Elmore telling the station that closures of two Colorado-based teams out of the Pioneer League made the venture unsustainable.

“I can confirm that the team will not be playing in 2026,” Pioneer League president Michael Shapiro told The Gazette in an email.

The move was long rumored, particularly after the Vibes recently held a large-scale garage sale. Team officials have not returned multiple requests for comment from The Gazette over the course of several weeks.

“It was kind of inevitable considering with all these recent changes in the Pioneer League,” said longtime team historian Chris Moyer, referring to recent closures of teams based in Grand Junction and Windsor.

The current run of baseball in the city brought colorful mascots like Sox the Fox and Toasty (a larger than life s’more) and Hall of Fame players Jim Thome and Todd Helton to the stadium on Barnes Road and Tutt Boulevard in eastern Colorado Springs.

This is the culmination of a decades-long fall for the team that the Elmore Sports Group brought to Colorado Springs in 1988 from Honolulu as the Triple-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.

The Sky Sox, as the team was known during much of its run in Colorado Springs, then served as the initial Triple-A home of the Colorado Rockies beginning in 1993.

In 2014 the Rockies took their Triple-A team to Albuquerque, and professional baseball in Colorado Springs never fully recovered.

The Sky Sox began a four-year run as the Triple-A home of the Milwaukee Brewers, but the altitude and weather that were logical for players preparing for Coors Field did not mesh with the Brewers. In 2019 a shift took Triple-A baseball out of the city and replaced it with a Rookie League affiliate in the Pioneer League that rebranded itself as the Rocky Mountain Vibes.

In 2020, Major League Baseball reduced the number of minor league levels and cut ties with the Rookie League level. That left the Vibes and their Pioneer League brethren to play at an independent level with only a tenuous connection to MLB.

Recently the Northern Colorado Owlz, playing in Windsor, of the Pioneer League folded and played out the final months of the season out of Colorado Springs.

The Rocky Mountain Vibes averaged 2,390 in announced attendance for their 48 openings in 2025, according to Pioneer League statistics. At its Triple-A peak, the club averaged more than 4,100 fans for a 72-game season.

“For me, it’s kind of sad considering that prior to 1988, minor league baseball here was very limited,” Moyer said, referring to stretches where minor league baseball was played in Colorado Springs from 1901-1905, 1916 and as a Single-A affiliate of the Chicago White Sox for nine years in the 1950s. “We were sort of seeing changes over the years that were kind of leaning to potential problems, I guess, down the road.”

Any future minor league baseball in Colorado Springs would seem unlikely under the current configuration. The only level that travels by plane is Triple-A, but the tenure of the Brewers showed there might be little appetite for a team to add a high-altitude affiliate. Other levels travel by bus, with teams lumped together geographically in a way that would not make adding a team from the Front Range feasible.

The Gazette’s Hugh Johnson contributed to this report