On its first Opening Day, visiting Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis anointed Buffalo Stadium as the finest new minor league ballpark in America.
The new Buff Stadium of 1928 was great enough to serve as the home of our minor league Houston Buffaloes from the late 1920s all the way through the last picture show of 1961. Except for the World War II years (1943-45) in which the entire Texas League shutdown due to the talent drain from all the baseball players on combat duty, the Buffs played out the large balance of their minor league history at Buff Stadium from 1928 through 1961. Their previous home, from 1907 through 1927, had been at West End Park, off Smith on Andrews Street.
1928 wasn’t simply a year for new ballparks. General Manger Branch Rickey of the parent club St. Louis Cardinals had poured a ton of talent into the Buffs roster as it began competition in its new bright and shiny digs in the near East End on St. Bernard Avenue (now Cullen Boulevard).
Red Worthington, Left Field, 1928 Houston Buffs
Left fielder Red Worthington led the club in hitting in 1928 with 211 hits that were good enough for a .352 season batting average that ranked him up there with the league leaders.
The club had two qualities in general that are basic to strong championship clubs. The 1928 Buff had hitting and pitching. In addition to Worthington, catcher/playing manager Frank “Pancho” Snyder banged out 177 hits for a .329 batting average; second baseman Cary Selph crunched out 198 safeties for a .312 mark; center fielder George “Watty” Watkins also hit safely 177 times for a .306 tab; and right fielder Ray Powell slid over the magic mark at .302 as the fifth full-season .300 batter in the starting lineup. Worthington’s 211 hit total led the Texas League in 1928.
Field Manager Snyder also managed one of the best minor league starting rotations ever assembled.
In deference to all that Dizzy Dean and the great 1931 Buffs accomplished, the 1928 Houston team even matched then surpassed that club’s accomplishments. With four twenty-games or more winners performing as the steel-fortified starting rotation, there wasn’t much doubt from early on that the 1928 Buffs definitely were the team to beat in the Texas League. Jim Lindsey (25-10, 3.49) led the Texas League in wins; WIld Bill Hallahan (23-12, 2,23, 244 K) led the league with the lowest ERA and the most strike outs (Ks). Ken Penner (20-8. 3.47) and Frank Barnes (20-9, 2.95) rounded out winner’s row on the Houston mound.
The Buffs and the Wichita Falls Spudders finished in a dead heat with records of 101-53 at season’s end, but the Buff then won a best three of five playoff series by 3 games to 1 over the Spudders to finish the season as Texas League champions with a playoff-game incorporated final 1928 record of 104-54.
The 1928 Houston Buffs went on to defeat the Birmingham Barons in the Dixie Series, four games to two, to reign supreme as the best club on the two blocks of southern and southwestern soil that were better known as the Southern Association and the Texas League. As you may also recall, the 1931 Buffs of Dizzy Dean would also go up against the boys from Birmingham in the Dixie Series, but the much more ballyhooed later Dean-Buffs would lose to the Barons, four games to three.
Because baseball greatness has always been measured more by where you finished than it has been by how you did while getting there, I have to go with the 1928 Houston Buffs, the first club to play in their wonderful namesake ballpark, as the greatest Buff team of all time. Of the four Houston Buff teams to win the Dixie Series (1928, 1947, 1956, & 1957), that first Buff club was the best all the way in my book. They did it all season with hitting and pitching. They had it together in full force when they needed a playoff victory to wrap up the league pennant. And they finished off the best team of the Southern Association in a manner befitting champions of a universe bigger than their own back yard when it really counted on a larger stage.
Long live the memory of the 1928 Houston Buffs. Through 2010, the Buffs remain our city’s greatest example of winning baseball. That could change in the future, of course, but it remains in the hands of the Houston Astros now to rewrite any history of this city’s greatest past championship moments in baseball.
The Buffs have done all they can for history. They finished their part of the job 49 years ago.
Tags: 1928 Houston Buffs, Baseball, History
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