Over the course of this beautiful sport’s history, baseball’s minor league circuit has taken on many different forms.

In the early days, affiliation took on a wild west-type form, with big-league clubs picking up and dropping smaller teams with ease. It wasn’t unheard of for major-league teams to have partnerships with well over a dozen other teams scattered clear across the country.

The record for affiliations, per Baseball Reference, belongs to the St. Louis Cardinals, who boasted some level of partnership with a stunning 31 clubs during the 1940 season. Their network, spanning from teams in their own state like Springfield, all the way out to North Carolina, and even in Hamilton up in Canada, was the culmination of general manager Branch Rickey’s work to create the modern player development system.

The stories of hundreds of leagues, thousands of players, and the cities that welcomed those teams still linger on deep in the lore of baseball. But today, organized baseball is rather rigid. And since 1946, the highest rung of minor league baseball has denoted as Triple-A, where you’re just one call away from the parent club.

That top-notch prospect is just one call away from sending the hometown team’s fan base into a frenzy. The journeyman veteran is just one call away from getting one more chance to carve out his major league dreams. The undervalued, underrated fill-in is just one call away from proving what he can really do, and forcing the suits above him into making some difficult decisions.

Triple-A is filled with all different kinds of stories, backgrounds, and experiences. But the one thing that binds every ballplayer at that level of the sport is the hope, the desire, the desperation to hear the phone ring for their name.

The call can come at any minute, in any scenario, from any city where a big-league ballclub could find themselves.

Today, the longest distance between a Triple-A affiliate and a major league club is 1,330 miles. When the Los Angeles Dodgers bring somebody up from their affiliate in Oklahoma City, those incoming players have to make quite the trek to make it to Southern California in time.

But that pales in comparison to the distance once shared by the Pittsburgh Pirates and their Triple-A affiliate, the Hawaii Islanders. For four years, the frantic day when a player received that long-awaited promotion could have included a scramble to fly over 4,600 miles from the sunny island life of Honolulu to the steel-hardened city of Pittsburgh.

Starting in 1983, players right on the brim of suiting up in Major League Baseball for the Pirates couldn’t have been playing for their chances from farther away. Spending their home-bound days at Aloha Stadium on the island of Oahu, the Islanders would partner with the Pirates until 1986, representing them in the Pacific Coast League.

Pittsburgh’s affiliate history includes some incredible distances, including the crossing of the northern border on multiple occasions. Triple-A affiliates of the Pirates have included Hollywood, Calgary, and Vancouver. But at no point before or since have the Pirates ever played so far away from their top minor league club.

And although their time as affiliates was short-lived, Honolulu would host dozens of future Buccos and big-leaguers, including 1988 All-Star pitcher Bob Walk and the eventual seven-time MLB MVP, Barry Bonds.

In this year’s edition of the Fifth Avenue Sports Summer Series, we will take a look back at the history of the Pirates’ presence in Honolulu, and the story of the Islanders, the Aloha State’s only professional baseball team.