Morris Frank served as Master of Ceremoniies at the first and several other Houston Winter Baseball Banquets from 1961 forward.
How could such a grand annual pre-season celebration by the hard core Houston baseball community, the Annual Houston Winter Baseball Dinner, have been allowed to disappear without notice a couple of years ago? The simplest explanation unwinds from our ability to understand the workings of time’s hands on so many best laid plans in life. It began with a major push of support from the new MLB ownership of Houston baseball in the National League. It died from the apathy of new Houston club ownership in either 2011 or 2012. I’ve even now forgotten the exact year, but it just stopped, without fanfare or notice. The apathy of a new Astros club president, fortunately now departed, apparently had a lot to do with it. The man failed to understand that any need for change in the way the club was run did not include killing a major lifeline of fan support.
The moral of the story is simple for other baseball club administrative aspirants: We don’t care if you went to Harvard and earned an MBA from there, if you don’t understand how baseball fan allegiance to a baseball club works over time, get the hell away from trying to run our baseball club. Your self-absorbed ambitions are better served in politics.
On a more temperate note, here’s a story from the Baytown Sun about plans for the first Houston Baseball Banquet in 1961. The group would quickly establish the Dickie Kerr Award as the prize they would annually give to the MLB outstanding pitcher from the previous season. From what we have been able to learn, it appears that Warren Spahn of the Braves took the first one at the second winter banquet in 1962 for his 21-13, 3.02 ERA record in 1961. It is possible that the Kerr Award may have begun in 1961, but we were unable to find an out-of-Houston resource that carried a post-banquet report on the specific awards of that evening. A check of the Houston news files from one of our brick and mortar local news repositories is needed.
One correction from our original report n this space: Former Houston Buffs President Allen Russell was not involved in the establishment of this banquet series as we mistakenly first reported. Russell had been involved in the establishment of post-season Houston Buff dinners after the club won the 1947 Dixie Series, and he and his wife Jo Russell were later involved in the resurrection of these Houston MLB banquets when they bogged down a few years later, but he was not part of the initial effort put together by first general dinner chairman Jimmy Delmar.
My apologies for the original reporting error.
Now here’s the article from back in time:
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First Time for Houston —
BASEBALL DINNER SET
HOUSTON (12/20/60) – Houston’s first annual major league baseball dinner will be held.at the Shamrock-Hilton Hotel Tuesday, Jan. 10 (1961) celebrating this city’s entry into the National League in 1962, the Houston Sports Association announced Saturday.
Jimmy Delmar, one of Houston’s staunchest baseball boosters and long-time player, manager, and semi-pro baseball leader, will be general chairman of the dinner. Morris Frank, newspaper columnist and sage of East Texas, will be master of ceremonies.
Warren C. Giles, president of the National League, has formally accepted an invitation to be the principal speaker.
All seven managers of the National League have been invited to be the guests of the HSA and Danny Murtaugh, manager of the world champion Pittsburgh Pirates, was the first to wire his acceptance.
The Chicago Cubs have not yet named their manager and as soon as he is announced he will be added to te guest list.
Several other outstanding baseball players, past and present, have been invited to attend, including a member of the Pittsburgh club and one of the World Series stars.
One of the high spots of the dinner will be the establishment of an annual award to be given each winter to a baseball player or official for an outstanding contribution to the game.
George Kirksey of the HSA saw the winter baseball dinner as an important link between the Astros and deep core Houston fans.
George Kirksey, executive vice-president of the Houston National League club, said that the HSA hopes to make the Houston dinner one of the highlights of the Winter baseball banquet circuit each year. Most of the major league cities hold dinners during the winter with the Baseball Writers Association in each city sponsoring the affair.
“We will introduce the Houston National League front office organization to the fans at our dinner,” said Kirksey, “as well as introduce the National League president and many of the National managers and stars to the fans at the same time.”
Among the Houston National League club’s personnel which will be formally introduced to Houston fandom will be General Manager Gabe Paul; Bobby Bragan, director of player personnel and farm clubs; Tal Smith, assistant farm director; Bill Giles, administrative assistant; Paul Florence, veteran scout; Grady Hatton, minor league manager and scout; Red Murff, scout; and others.
General Chairman Delmar, who started out in baseball in 1920 as batboy for Kid Elberfield, the original “Tabasco Kid” and then manager of the Little Rock club in the Southern Association, has been closely identified with baseball in Houston for a quarter of a century.
He headed up the Pro-Amateur Baseball Federation for five years, was President of the Gulf Coast Victory League during World War II, was manager of the Grand Prize semi-pro baseball team which won many state titles and finished third in the national tournament in Wichita, Kansas in 1940, and is the past president of the Athletic Committee of the Chamber of Commerce. As a player he was a pitcher.
The dinner will be held in the Emerald Room. Tickets will be priced at $10.00. Committees and other details of the dinner will be announced later.
~ Baytown Sun, December 20, 1960, Page 9.
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The Pecan Park Eagle 
July 21, 2014 at 1:49 pm |
Unfortunately, the new Astros regime is killing many people’s interest in the team, and allowing the annual winter dinner to die is just one manifestation of that. The fiasco with this year’s first-round draft pick was just the latest act in their clown show. Even if they thought Aiken could get injured, they should have signed him and let happen what may. Young guys can rehab from surgery – the Washington Nationals picked a pitcher that won’t play until next year because he is having (or just had, I don’t recall) Tommy John surgery.
We fans have been quite patient with Crane’s ownership because we realized that Drayton McLane left him a mess. I’m glad the Astros decided to quit overpaying over-the-hill veterans in the hope that they could “be champions” (McLane’s mantra). I understand the pains of a complete rebuild. However, I have to question Jeff Luhnow’s ‘genius’ when I look at the Appel and Aiken picks. There was a reason Appel had fallen to eighth in the previous year (and it wasn’t just his choice of Scott Boras as an agent), but the Astros chose him anyway in 2013. The kid is an unmitigated disaster right now, and I don’t hold any hope of him getting his act together.
The Comcast mess certainly isn’t gaining the Astros any converts; if anything, more and more people are losing interest in the team because they can’t watch the games. Again, McLane left Crane holding the bag on that one, and there is blame enough to go around on all sides, but it certainly hasn’t helped the franchise. The Astros seem to infer that they will begin to spend money on free agents once they start getting their television revenues. When, pray tell, might that be? In the meantime, they want to sell us on the idea that players like Robbie Grossman are as adequate as fill-ins as any free agents they might have been able to sign. Sorry, Astros, there’s another minor league team a little way down 59 from you, and their ticket prices are cheaper than yours. That’s where I’m spending my dollars these days as I keep up with the Astros via the web and the Houston Chronicle.
The most galling thing about the new Astros regime, though, is that they treat us fans as though we were idiots. They never can admit to a mistake but always assert that they are following all MLB rules and are staying the course of their plan. If their plan is to destroy interest in their franchise, then I say, “Mission accompished.” If it weren’t for Jose Altuve and George Springer (who does need to cut down on his strikeouts), then I wouldn’t have any reason whatsoever to want to keep up with the 2014 Astros, and I’m as big a fan of the team as there ever has been (anyone who knows me will vouch for that).
The state of professional sports in Houston is pathetic all the way around right now. Sixty percent of the city can’t watch the Astros or Rockets as their respective ‘genius’ GMs – Luhnow and Darryl Morey – stumble and bumble their teams into being just a tease or completely irrelevant. I haven’t heard anyone call Texans GM Rick Smith a genius, so maybe there is still hope for him. Nah! I don’t think so!
Sorry for the rant, Bill. Obviously I feel as strongly as you do (as is evidenced by your second paragraph in today’s post).
July 21, 2014 at 3:21 pm |
Bill and Rick: you are entitled to your well-reasoned rants! Thanks for so ably stating what many of us believe. I too agree with Bill’s second paragraph, and wish that both of you would send your comments to the Chronicle or any other media outlet which would publish or air them. We need some strong voices to speak up for the baseball fans of Houston and of south and central Texas; those voices may continue to fall on the deaf ears of Astros management and ownership, but at least they will have been expressed. Thanks!
July 21, 2014 at 4:41 pm |
Thanks to both of you, Rick and Marsha. Now I would like to add what I just wrote to someone else who preferred to communicate by e-mail: If only the pen were truly as powerful as some people’s belief in the spin game when stupidity explodes in their faces.
July 21, 2014 at 6:05 pm |
Allow me to give one more example of how far the Astros have fallen. I was recently visiting my mom in the Central Texas hamlet of Belton, which is approximately equidistant from Houston and Dallas. While shopping at the local Walmart, a man approached me and asked where I had bought the Astros shirt and cap I was wearing – he said he couldn’t find Astros gear anywhere in the area (and Temple and Killeen are both next door). I had to inform him that I lived in Houston and had bought my items there, and I had to enlighten him to the fact that Central Texas was now Texas Rangers country. He agreed as he repeated that he’d looked in several stores for Astros merchandise.
It didn’t always used to be that way – you used to be able to find items from both teams in that area. Unfortunately, the decline of the Astros has coincided with the rise of the Rangers (this season’s injury-riddled disaster excepted), and most people who don’t live near to either city have become bandwagon fans and support the team that is winning.
It will be interesting to see how the fortunes of both franchises play out in the near future. The Rangers also have a GM – Jon Daniels – who has had the genius label applied to him, but I think his genius is as questionable as Jeff Luhnow’s. As a matter of fact, in addition to being overused, the word ‘genius’ appears to have taken on it’s opposite meaning as far as I’m concerned. Maybe the Astros regime’s treatment of us fans as idiots is actually a compliment, then, if the words ‘genius’ and ‘idiot’ have switched definitions.