Circa 1906 (Possibly), when both the Houston Buffalos and Austin Senators were members of the short-lived South Texas League.
“Oh give me a home – where the buffalo roam – and I’ll show you a dirty house!”
– ancient burlesque show/vaudeville one-liner joke.
From the earliest days of their existence as a professional baseball club, the team from Houston has been known by a variety of nicknames, everything from the Babies in 1888 to the Mud Cats the following first local pennant season and then, too, the Magnolias, Wanderers, Lambs, Red Stockings, and God Knows what else. Some of these monikers too almost seemed pinned by the fans and the media in the moment of some associative fling and not really intended as an official identity or marketing ploy. It was just a very different fan culture and business mindset that enveloped baseball back in the formative years, almost as though every lesson on what not to do in establishing teams in organized play was set up to be learned the hard way.
Hmmm! Come to think about it, maybe things haven’t changed so much after all.
We will have a lot more in print on the history of Houston team names when the local SABR chapter’s new book in progress, “Houston Baseball, The Early Years, 1861-1961” (working title) comes out in 2014, but today’s focus is only on the most famous minor league club identity we ever had in the form of the wondrous old Houston Buffalos or Buffs.
We don’t know who came up with the idea originally, but the “Buffs” apparently came into being as the local team nickname, albeit temporarily, for the first time in 1896, when the ball club still played at the park on Travis at McGowen. It isn’t hard to quickly deduce that the inspiration for the name came easily from that less than majestic body of winding brown water that skirts its way in oozing flow along the northern edge of downtown. Buffalo Bayou was even the way to the site that the city’s founding fathers, the Allen Brothers, took when they first came here and settled upon a home for “Houston” in 1836.
In going back further down the bison trail, I’ve never read of anyone who has come up with evidence that any large herd of buffo ever roamed the Houston area or drank sustainingly from those curative downtown waters, but it is logical to assume that one or two of them may have passed through this area back in the days prior to the coming of European ethnic settlers.
From 1906 through 1981, except for the three seasons that baseball shut down in Houston for World War II (1843-45), Houston played professional ball as the Buffalos/Buffs at both old West End Park (1905-27) and Buff/Busch Stadium (1928-1961) and the bison identity was all over everything that anything to do with our city’s past accomplishments and future hopes.
That all changed when Judge Roy Hofheinz and the Houston Sports Association won out over Marty Marion and his group from the Buffs for the NL expansion club that had been awarded to Houston in 1960 to start play in 1962. Hofheinz and Company still had to compensate Marion & Group for taking over their minor league territory, but this settlement supposedly came about only after acrimonious and costly expense to the Judge’s bankroll.
One Theory (Deserving of Further Exploration): As one big result of the Hofheinz-Marion battle, and it might have happened, anyway, Hofheinz turned completely away from all things “Buff” and worked to rename the new major league team with a fresh image. They were the Colt .45s from 1962-64 and then the Astros from 1965 to eternity.
Buff Stadium was torn down after sustaining serious damage from Hurricane Carla late in its last 1961 minor league season and the surviving buffalo medallions that once lined its roof top were sold at ground zero for four dollars a piece.
One of the eighty 36″ in diameter metal buffalo medallions from 1928 that has survived the demolition of Buff/Busch Stadium in 1962.
Finger Furniture has preserved a foothold on Buff history at the former stadium site for fifty years, but now even that is changing. The Buffs will still be remembered for as long as there are still those among us who remember them – and through the book that we are now engaged in writing as the true story of Houston’s long history with the great sport of baseball.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
May 17, 2014 at 2:56 am |
Sure there were buffalo in the area. Before the white man came, the buffalo used to go very fast down this one trail and the indigenous people, try to protect themselves from the inevitable buffalo that went astray, erected a barrier to keep the buffalo on the trail. The names of these places survive in our street names today: Buffalo Speedway, and BISON-net.
June 28, 2015 at 12:41 am |
I have one of the salvaged medallions.