Texas Baseball: A Lone Star Diamond History from Town Teams to the Big Leagues

TEX AS

H A S A LW A Y S A NS W E R E D T H E C A LL TO “PLAY BA LL!”

TEX AS BASEBA LL

F

rom pioneering superstars like Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby and Negro League standouts Smokey Joe Williams and Willie Well to present-day luminaries like Nolan Ryan, Texas has played a crucial role in the evolution of the national pastime. The Lone Star love of baseball stretches back to the Civil War. What began as friendly town games led to the formation of the Texas League in 1888, though it would be almost eight decades before the arrival of the Colt .45s, Texas’s first major-league team, and another fortythree years until the Astros played in the World Series. From scrappers on the red dirt diamonds to the big-league stars of the Astros and Rangers, veteran sportswriter Clay Coppedge traces the state’s long love affair with the sport in this first-ever comprehensive look at Texas baseball.

A L O N E S TA R DI A M O N D H I S T O R Y F R OM T OW N T E A M S T O T H E BI G L E A G U E S

$19.99

C LAY C OPPEDGE

A L O N E S TA R DI A M O N D H I S T O R Y F R OM T OW N T E A M S T O T H E BI G L E A G U E S

C LAY C OPPEDGE

Published by The History Press Charleston, SC 29403 www.historypress.net Copyright Š 2012 by Clay Coppedge All rights reserved First published 2012 Manufactured in the United States ISBN 978.1.60949.598.5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coppedge, Clay.

Texas baseball : a Lone Star diamond history from town teams to the big leagues / Clay Coppedge. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60949-598-5 1. Baseball--Texas--History. 2. Baseball teams--Texas--History. 3. Baseball players--Texas--Biography. I. Title.

GV863.T4C67 2012 796.35709764--dc23 2012008740 Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For Tori, who allowed me to share my love of the game with her

Contents

Opening Days Forever Youngs The Grey Eagle and Rajah Uncle Billy, Bibb and Mr. Rickey Dizzy Dazzled Rube, Willie and Smokey Joe “What’s Wrong with Negro Baseball?”

Oilers, Cowboys and Education through Recreation Battling a Slump Big-League Dreams You Can’t Lose ’Em All Dome Sweet Dome Born Under a Bad Sign The Psychedelic ’70s Turn for the Better Some Divided Loyalties Dreams of a Texas World Series More Than a Game World Series Reality A Perfect Moment The Baseball Gods Are Fickle

7 13 19 25 35 41 49 55 61 67 77 83 91 101 111 125 139 149 159 163 175

Contents Postscript Bibliography Index About the Author

179 181 185 192

6

Opening Days

I

n 1861, some enterprising Houston gentlemen formed the Houston Base Ball Club to promote the relatively new sport locally, much as clubs in New York had done, but the Civil War postponed organized baseball, along with everything else in the country. The conflict did, in that peculiar cross-cultural way of wars, help spread the game to the South and to Texas.

Confederates probably learned it either as prisoners of war or while guarding Union prisoners. Abraham Lincoln was a baseball player. In fact, he was playing a game of sandlot ball when he formally received word that he had won the presidential nomination in 1860. He told the messenger, “Tell the gentlemen they will have to wait a few minutes till I get my turn at bat.”

Two years after the end of the Civil War, on April 21, 1867, the Houston Stonewalls slaughtered the Galveston Robert E. Lees by a score of 35–2 in a friendly game of “base ball,” as it was usually spelled in those days. The game took place on the thirty-first anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, the site of the battle where Sam Houston’s ragtag army of volunteers defeated Mexican general Santa Anna’s troops and thus earned Texas’s independence from Mexico. Just as there was no mercy rule on the battlefield, apparently none was in place at this baseball game either.

Stories that Abner Doubleday was at the game and even played in it are not true, nor is the myth that Doubleday invented the game of baseball.

Doubleday spent some time in Texas after the war—first in Galveston and later in west Texas—but he was in Galveston as a member of an occupying army. Even if he had been at the game, and even if he had invented it, it is

Texas Baseball

Above: Kids took to baseball early, as shown by this 1895 team near La Grange. Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives.

Left: Abner Doubleday did a lot of things, but inventing the game of baseball was not one of them. Library of Congress.

8

A Lone Star Diamond History from Town Teams to the Big Leagues doubtful that the Stonewalls or Lees would have invited a Union officer to play for them. It has been said of Doubleday that the only thing he ever started was the Civil War—he fired the first cannon shot in defense of Fort Sumter.

Doubleday left behind a lot of correspondence of significant historical value, but nowhere does he mention, even in passing, the game he is said to have invented. At the time he was said to have invented it—1839—he was at West Point. Army records indicate that Doubleday was “correct in deportment, social and communicative with his companions…but adverse to outdoor sports.”

Doubleday wasn’t anointed inventor of baseball until fourteen years after he died, when sporting goods magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding appointed a commission to find the origin of the game that was helping to make him rich. He appointed Abraham G. Mills to chair the Mills Commission, which concluded, “The first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.”

The commission’s main source for the story was a letter from one Abner Graves of Cooperstown, who, at age ninety, was convicted of killing his wife and was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Most likely, the commission determined that it was impossible to establish who actually invented baseball. It might have concluded, correctly, that the game was based somewhat on the English games of rounders and cricket and that those games were based on other games that might have gone back as far as the fourteenth century. With a deadline looming, it might have simply decided to trace the origins back to a West Point graduate and war hero who, without something a little extra special added to his name, might not be remembered by history at all.

Most of the baseball played in Texas in the late nineteenth century consisted of “town” teams. Baseball was a welcome diversion and an inexpensive form of recreation at a time and place when there was little of either. Nearly every town had at least one baseball team, and some had as many as three, which were usually divided along racial lines: white, black and Hispanic. A team from one town would play a team from another town for bragging rights, and people from local communities would gather on Sunday afternoons to watch the local lads play a little ball. This was the heart of the game in Texas and in the wider world for the first decades of the game’s existence. In Baseball: The People’s Game, baseball historian Harold Seymour wrote about how the game brought communities and neighborhoods together: 9

Texas Baseball

LaGrange baseball team, circa 1915. Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives.

The town baseball team acted as a cohesive agent in the community.

Symbolizing the town’s quality and providing a clear-cut means of demonstrating it, the team ignited local pride…Most teams, at least at the outset, were composed wholly or in part of home town players, the fans’ own neighbors and even relatives, and so made for a close bond between team and residents.

In Texas, a lot of the first baseball games were played in pastures where sheep or cattle kept the grass at a playable level. Women fried chicken and prepared jars of lemonade for the game, and people came from miles around to see the local nine take on another town team.

Bragging rights were always on the line. When something other than bragging rights was at stake, it wasn’t unusual for towns to hire a ringer, somebody from a nearby semipro team, to take over one of the positions, usually pitcher.

Not too long after baseball became a popular pastime, the game went from being strictly a form of fun and recreation to a legitimate business enterprise with owners, bosses, employees and customers, otherwise known as fans; the notion of paying players and charging admission to the game took root in many an entrepreneurial mind.

10

A Lone Star Diamond History from Town Teams to the Big Leagues The National Association, formed in 1871, took hold in New York and Philadelphia and morphed into the National League in 1876. That same year, the International Association was formed in hopes that people in small towns might pay to watch professional baseball, too. Other like-minded leagues soon followed, and in one, the Midwest League, a fair-to-middling utility player named John McCloskey emerged.

McCloskey played all nine positions on the field at one time or another and would also umpire and manage. He formed his own barnstorming team, the Joplin Independents, and brought it to Texas for a series of exhibition games against teams from Fort Worth, Waco and Austin. They knocked off the Fort Worth and Waco teams with little trouble, but McCloskey got a tip from a bellman in Austin that something was up: the local organizers had brought in some ringers from the Southern Association to play the Independents.

The Independents held on to beat the Austin ringers, but McCloskey was impressed by the passion that would lead somebody to load up a team of ringers for an exhibition game. He got the idea that such passion might support a professional baseball league.

From that notion came the Texas League, first called the Texas League of Base Ball Clubs, which played its first game on April 1, 1888, in Houston.

The term “Texas Leaguer,” meant to describe a bloop single, was coined that first year and has been part of the sports lexicon ever since. The league had financial trouble from the first. Fans were rowdy and would sometimes whip out pistols and take shots at fly balls either for fun or in vain attempts to change their trajectories.

Much of the financial trouble could be traced back to the fact that neither McCloskey nor his investors knew anything about running a professional baseball league. McCloskey eschewed a leadership position in the league he helped form, choosing instead to manage the Austin Independents and play center field. The league barely made it through its first year and limped through a couple more years before it started a process of going out of business one year and starting again a year or two later. Finally, in 1902, the league opened again and this time got it right. With the exception of 1943–45, when the majority of America’s young men were engaged in the war effort, the Texas League has operated ever since McCloskey got the bright idea to start it.

McCloskey umpired and managed in the Texas League and the Southern League before heading west and helping start the Pacific Coast League, where he became a manager. He got his shot at the Major Leagues in 1906, when he managed the St. Louis Cardinals, but his teams were a woeful 19711

Texas Baseball 434 from 1906 through 1908, for a paltry .312 winning percentage, the worst ever for a manager with at least 300 games. He returned to Texas and started the Rio Grande Valley League in 1914 and, true to form, managed the El Paso team in 1915. In his seventies, he helped organize the Kitty League in the Midwest. He died in 1940 from a stroke and is buried in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. The obituary from the Louisville Courier said of him: Honest John never made any money from any league he organized. To effect the organization of a league, he would take the weakest town in the proposed circuit, a town nobody else wanted. Frequently, the town he took was the one to fold. He often paid players on defunct clubs out of his own pocket. And during the winter he spent his own money turning the ground into virgin baseball territory, for the planting of the seed of professional baseball.

12

TEX AS

H A S A LW A Y S A NS W E R E D T H E C A LL TO “PLAY BA LL!”

TEX AS BASEBA LL

F

rom pioneering superstars like Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby and Negro League standouts Smokey Joe Williams and Willie Well to present-day luminaries like Nolan Ryan, Texas has played a crucial role in the evolution of the national pastime. The Lone Star love of baseball stretches back to the Civil War. What began as friendly town games led to the formation of the Texas League in 1888, though it would be almost eight decades before the arrival of the Colt .45s, Texas’s first major-league team, and another fortythree years until the Astros played in the World Series. From scrappers on the red dirt diamonds to the big-league stars of the Astros and Rangers, veteran sportswriter Clay Coppedge traces the state’s long love affair with the sport in this first-ever comprehensive look at Texas baseball.

A L O N E S TA R DI A M O N D H I S T O R Y F R OM T OW N T E A M S T O T H E BI G L E A G U E S

$19.99

C LAY C OPPEDGE