Tom Forget / MLB.com

As you sit down to your Thanksgiving turkey this year and are about to carve that sucker up, just remember this: You could have dealt a professional ballplayer in exchange for your feast. At least, you could have if this was 1931 and your baseball team was owned by Joe Engel, the greatest showman this side of Bill Veeck .

Acting as an emissary for Clark Griffith, who owned the Washington Senators, Engel arrived in Chattanooga in 1929 with the cash necessary to buy the Chattanooga Lookouts, and quickly got around to building a new state-of-the-art ballpark for the club that could fit 10,000 fans. Though the team wasn't great, Engel would entice fans by giving away a house with a car in the garage and hosting a fake " wild elephant hunt " at the stadium with hunt

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