The Pecan Park Eagle

Excerpt from “Your 1948 Houston Buffs, Dixie Champions: Brief Biographies By Morris Frank and Adie Marks (1948).

Eddie Knoblauch
1947 Houston Buffs

Lefty hitting Eddie Knoblauch was one of those Buffs that always made me wonder: How did the guy miss getting so much as a single time at bat in the big leagues? I mean, the guy knew the strike zone as well as anyone I ever saw. He could draw walks like the great Eddie Yost and run the bases and handle the outfield with the best of them. He had no power, but he was a great contact-hitting table setter for 15 years as a mostly high level club minor leaguer. (1938-1942, 1946-1955: 2,543 hits, 20 HR, and a .313 career batting average.)

Houston fans enjoyed and suffered from a love/hate relationship with Eddie Knoblauch. He was a Buff  for 5 years (1942, 1946-1949), but then went over to the dark side in 1949 in deals that saw him also play for two other Texas League clubs at Dallas and then Shreveport. Eddie finished the last 7 seasons of his career (1949-1955) bedeviling the Buffs for teams at Dallas. Shreveport, Tulsa, and Beaumont several times over by becoming the guy who could beat your club in the 9th with either a 2-run bloop single or a bases loaded walk. – It was “pick your poison” time when Eddie Knoblauch came to bat in a late game pinch.

Eddie was the uncle of Chuck Knoblauch, who enjoyed both some good and some haunted seasons with both the Twins and the Yankees. He was also the brother of Ray Knoblauch, the long-time successful baseball coach at Bellaire High School in Houston.

Eddie Knoblauch died about 25 years ago, but neither I nor Baseball Reference.Com remembers the date. In fact, the outstanding Internet source even seems to think that Eddie Knoblauch is still alive, which he is not. When I am able to confirm the exact time and place of his death, I will include it here. I do remember that we was buried somewhere in the rural Austin-San Antonio area.

Oh, yes. Back to the question of why Eddie never got a shot at the big leagues, but I think we all know the most probable answers. For one thing, there were still only 16 MLB clubs back in the late 1940s and 1950s. For another, Knoblauch played the entire first half of his career, his prospective years, as either a farm hand in the talent rich Cardinals organization, or else, doing military duty in World War II. It wasn’t an easy time for all cream to find the top. The big league clubs owned all the player options through the reserve clause. Good players could either take what the clubs decided for them – or go home. Eddie Knoblauch, like a lot of other players from those spike-free negotiating days, did just that. He took what he could get and stayed in the game as a career Texas Leaguer.

Thanks for what you did, Eddie. You made the game an exciting thing to watch.

Tags: Eddie Knoblauch

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