Posts Tagged ‘Baseball’

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Joe Hunter Field, Beeville, Texas.

February 23, 2010

Joe Hunter Field, Beeville, Texas.

When Coastal Bend College first opened as Bee County College in Beeville, Texas back in 1967, funds for an athletic department of any kind did not exist beyond marginal money for basketball and baseball. The first “Cougar” teams had to share the playing facilities of A.C. Jones High School, home of the mighty Beeville Trojans.

In case you’ve never heard of it, Beeville is located about fifty-three miles west of Victoria and fifty miles north of Corpus Christi. It’s special to me as the original home of my family, the place I was born. My brother and sister live there and my parents are buried there. It’s just not all the way home for me. Home for me is Houston, the place where I grew up from age five, the place where my old bones will someday be interred. I’m still attached to Beeville as the home of my people since the 19th century.

Beeville also is the birthplace of four former major leaguers: outfielder Curt Walker (1919-30) .304 lifetime, struck out only 254 times in 4,858 times at bat, Texas Baseball Hall of Fame, 2001; pitcher Melvin “Bert” Gallia (1912-20) 66-68, 3.14 ERA; pitcher “Lefty” Lloyd Brown (1925, 1928-37, 1940) 91-105, 4.20; and Eddie Taubensee (1991-2001) .273 BA, 94 HR. Major league hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo also is a native of Beeville. That’s a pretty good baseball production record for a little cattle, oil and gas, and now penitentiary town in South Texas. Don’t you think?

Joe Hunter Field was a Ranching Widow’s Gift.

The college acquired its beautiful baseball park in the early 1970s as a construction gift on land they owned at campus site north of Beeville. The Joe Hunter family donated the funds needed to construct the stands and cultivate the playing field, but the oral history of how the gift took shape is even richer as a gift.

The story is that Mrs. Joe Hunter went to the college after her rancher husband died, saying that she wanted to make a contribution to the school in her husband’s name. Someone from the college suggested that she consider donating money for the construction of a college library, but Mrs. Hunter apparently killed that idea right off the bat and then got down to business on what she really wanted to do.

“Old Joe never read a book or went near a library in his whole life,” she supposedly said, “but he loved baseball. I’d love to build you a baseball park and put Joe’s name on it.” And that’s exactly what she did.

For years, “Bee County College” operated from one of the finest small school baseball parks in the nation. They even leased Joe Hunter Field for use by the professional Beeville Bees in the short-lived independent Gulf Coast League (1976-77) and also made it available to Jones High School and various spring high school playoff games. The place had an enclosed press box, a PA system, and seating capacity for about 1,000 fans.

Unfortunately, the first recession in the oil market of 1983 soon took its economic toll on what the college could afford and they dropped both their baseball and basketball programs. The ballpark stayed afloat as the Home of the Beeville Trojan high school team and an occasional playoff game. In spite of the missing college program, Coastal Bend College maintained the field and protected “Joe Hunter” from going to seed.

The left field line is 26 feet further than Minute Maid Park.

Joe Hunter was and is – a pitcher’s park. Facing southeast, the springtime winds from Copano Bay only have about thirty crow-fly miles to travel before they blow in over the outfield walls in center and right, and these distances aren’t cheap. The distances are about 341 down the line, 375 in the power alleys, and 400 in straight away center.

The good news is that junior college baseball may be returning soon to Joe Hunter Field. I’m not sure if that means we’re looking at a patch of blue in the gray skies of this economic recession – or if it means that Beevillians are just tired of missing their baseball. Maybe it’s a little of both.

Beeville has always been a baseball town.

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Eckhardt: A Tale of Two Oxen.

February 22, 2010

Ox Eckhardt's .367 lifetime BA Beats Cobb by Fractions for Best All Time in Professional Baseball. He also played Football for the Texas Longhorns & New York (NFL) Giants.

Professional baseball player Oscar “Ox” Eckhardt (BL/TR) was born in Yorktown, Texas on December 23, 1901. At 6’1″ and 185 pounds, Ox was big enough in his time to also have played quarterback, halfback, and fullback in football for the Texas Longhorns and then briefly for the New York (NFL) Giants.

In 14 seasons (1925, 1928-1940) as a minor leaguer, Ox also hit .367, compiling 2,773 hits in 7.563 official times at bat. By a measure of some fractions, Ox Eckhardt edges Ty Cobb for the highest career batting average in professional baseball history.

Ox was a high batting average terror in the Pacific Coast League for years, winning several batting championships, once hitting .414 with 315 hits for Mission in 1933. What a terror he must have been to the pitchers on the West Coast that year.

Maybe “pest” is a better word for Ox. Years ago, I asked my dear friend, the late Red Munger, if he remembered Ox Eckhardt from those days. “Oh sure,” Red said, “Ox was the kind of guy who just liked to stick his lefthanded bat out there and hit the ball to the opposite left field. He had no power at all, but he had a great ability to just bloop that little hit to a soft spot over the infielders’ heads. If I could get him to top the ball on the ground, he made for an easy out. It just wasn’t easy getting him to do that.”

Red’s words stayed with me when I first started reading about Eckhardt’s two failures at the major league level. There really weren’t two Ox Eckhardts. It was a matter of the one Ox getting a very different result with his “Punch and Judy” dedication as a hitter at the major league level. In his first time up with the Boston Braves in 1932, Ox only got eight official at bats for two hits before he was shuffled back to the Pacific Coast League. His second and final trial came in spring training with manager Casey Stengel and the 1936 Brooklyn Dodgers. Things started auspiciously too.

Anxious to get any kind of pop into their lineup, the Dodgers agreed to Ox’s advance request for a double room in Florida, one of the concessions they made to a guy who just hit .399 with 283 season hits during the 1935 PCL season. The Dodgers assumed that Ox was bringing his wife to spring training with him.

(There’s that assumption flaw again. We don’t simply fall trap to it in research. It’s also an everyday error possibility.)

Ox showed up with his pet, a very large St. Bernard dog. “I thought he’d enjoy seeing how a major league club setup works in spring training,” Ox explained.

Ox and his dog got through spring training, but they did not survive Ox’s inability to adapt to major league pitching and defenses, nor could he use manager Stengel’s counsel to pull the ball.  All Ox knew how to do was hit the ball the other way. The major league third basemen simply played him down the line and the major league pitchers got him to hit the ball on the ground at the fielders.

On defense, Ox lived up to his name.

Ox was 8 for 44 with 6 singles, 1 double, 1 homer, a .182 batting average, and 1 ticket back to the Pacific Coast League by the middle of May 1936. He never got another big league trial, but he continued to bust ’em at the minor league level.

Ox Eckhardt passed away in Yorktown, Texas on April 22, 1951 at the age of 49. He is buried in the Oakwood Cemetery in Austin, Texas. His memory lives on as one of the most colorful hitters in baseball history. A .367 lifetime batting average is nothing to sneeze at as we walk away. It deserves attention, no matter how Ox’s style may have limited his full potential as a productive major league hitter, one who might have achieved  a major league career that could have been comparable to his minor league attainments.

As things turned out, we will just have to leave Ox Eckhardt over there in that large mountain we all know pretty much in the same way as the “might have been/woulda, coulda, shoulda” pile.

Good luck, Ghost of Ox, wherever you may be. Hope you finally found some new ways to hit ’em where they ain’t.

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Research 101: WATCH YOUR ASSumptions!

February 21, 2010

19th Century Base Ball? Don't Assume that either Third Baseman John Civitello or Hurler Robert Blair of the Houston Babies are Really That Old!

People have asked me why I spend so much free time researching Houston history, especially Houston baseball history. My answer is simple: I love Houston. I love baseball. I love research. And I have an unquenchable fire in my belly for separating what’s true from what we assume is true.

Rule Number One in Social Research 101 is “Never Assume.” And what does that mean? It means just about everything. It means: (1) Never assume that secondary sources of information are good enough if you can get to the primary sources these secondary sources examined to form their own conclusions. (2) Never assume that what we don’t know, we can’t find out. (3) Never assume that we shall ever discover all possible sources of information on a given subject. The work goes on forever. We just have to close the gate every now and then and report “what we know, so far.”

Here’s the major problem by comparison to a court of law on current criminal allegations. In a court of law, the court will examine the direct evidence, the direct witnesses, and maybe even hear directly from the people who are being charged with a criminal act. In historical research, we are examining events that took place years and sometimes lifetimes ago. All the living human sources of primary testimony are most likely dead. That leaves us with witness writings, and mainly newspaper accounts, as testimony of what happened long ago as our primary sources of the facts about the past – and these are always affected by the infusion of personal opinion and what the writer from long ago thought was important to share with us about the facts of a situation – and these are also affected by his or her agenda for writing in the first place.

Here’s what you learn quickly, if your research efforts are serious – and let’s use baseball research about Houston as an example. We’ll simply name it for what it is. Rule Number Two in Social Research is “Newspapers write to sell newspapers. They don’t write for the sake of preserving facts for history.” The best example from my local baseball research is over the question of certainty about the location of the first Houston baseball field of our 1888 first professional Houston team. A nameless writer for the Houston Post covered the first exhibition game played at “Houston Base Ball Park,” but he (gender assumption) never recorded in his story where it was located. As a news writer writing news for those times, he was free to assume that his readers already had that information from their personal experience. The assumption carried forward, at least, in all the game stories I’ve found to date. No one actually writes down the address or specific location of the park. Peripheral research “suggests” that the first park was located on the same site that became West End Park in 1907, but that’s only an assumption. It’s not proof certain.

So what? So what if we don’t ever know where the first ballpark was located?

If you have to ask those questions, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. All I can offer is going to sound like some kind of Jughead research professor talking, but that’s OK with me. As far as I’m concerned, the answers are this simple: The more we know about who, when, where, what, and how people came together in the past to do anything of note, the more we know about the birth of ideas and decisions that continue to shape our lives through today.

On April 16, 1861, a man named F.A. Rice led a group of Houstonians in a meeting room above J.H. Evans’s Store on Market Square to form the first Houston Base Ball Club. Because of Texas’s very recent secession from the Union, further recruitment of players for organized play was effectively delayed until after the Civil War, but the fact of this group’s actions verifies the formal existence of baseball in Houston to that date of some 149 years ago. Baseball was born in Houston prior to the Civil War, and not as a result of the great conflict, as previously assumed. That fact is big. Any story of Houston baseball history begins with it.

Research Number Three in Social Research: “If you forget anything, see Rule One.”

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Knuckleballer Al Papai.

February 19, 2010

Al Papai went 21-10 & 23-9 for the 1947 & 1951 Houston Buff Champs.

Al Papai brought two things to every game I ever saw him pitch: a dead pan facial expression and a knuckleball that floated all over the place. When it floated near the plate, he was often virtually unhittable as a 21-game winner for the Texas League and Dixie Series champion Houston Buffs of 1947. Returning to the Buffs in 1951, Papai went even deeper into the win column, finishing a second Texas League pennant season for the Buffs with a record of 23-9. At 6’3″ and 185 pounds, Papai resembled a string bean vine that  delivered unhittable grapefruit pitches. They twitched, wobbled, and floated, but you didn’t hit ’em far.
Papai pitched two additional years for less talented Buff clubs. He was 14-13 for the 8th and last place 1952 Houston Buffs and 11-16 for the 6th place Houston club. Over the course of his 14-season minor league career (1940-1958), Al Papai compiled a career record of 173 wins, 128 losses, and an earned run average of 3.29. His four 20 plus win seasons as a minor league pitcher all came late at ages 30, 34, 38, and 39. His last two big years came as a 23-7 mark for Oklahoma City of the Texas League in 1955 and a fine 20-10 record for Memphis of the Southern Association in 1956.
Al started late, but he was a gamer. During his four major league seasons (1948-1950, 1955), Al Papai never could find the consistency that would have allowed him the career path of the great Hoyt Wilhelm. He was just too out of control too often and too hittable to make it in the big leagues. In his various time with the Cardinals, Browns, Red Sox, and White Sox, Al Papai compiled a career major league record of 9 wins,  14 losses and an earned run average of 5.37. In 239.2 innings of major league work, he walked 138 and struck out only 70.
Papai did possess a dry sense of humor. Former ’51 Buff teammate Larry Miggins tells the story of how Al Papai served as escort to one of several young bathing beauties at Buff Stadium in 1951 who were competing for the title of “Miss Houston Buff.” Papai’s responsibility was for a beautiful girl named Kathryn Grandstaff, the eventual winner. That same girl went on to Hollywood from her bathing beauty days at Buff Stadium to become an actress named “Kathryn Grant” and the eventual new wife of singer Bing Crosby. Advised of her success at a later meeting with Miggins, Papai commented that “I just hope she remembers that I made her what she is today.” – That must have been one powerful walk, Al!
This memory is trying to conclude on a sad note. In 1995, I was helping the late Allen Russell locate the addresses of his former players for an invitation to a “Last Roundup of the Houston Buffs” in early October 1995. Papai’s was one of the last addresses we located, but his invitation went out in early September.
We soon learned that Al’s invitation had arrived on the afternoon of his funeral in Springfield, Illinois. He had passed away on September 7, 1995 at the age of 77. His lovely widow came in his behalf and I refuse to be sad about Al Papai. He was a great guy who gave it all he had. With a little more relaxation in his inner temperament, he might have had a career equal to Wilhelm’s. He certainly had the mechanics of the knuckleball in place. He just seemed to falter in the bigs from that old bugaboo of trying too hard.
Anybody out there ever run into that problem?





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The 1st Great Buff: Tris Speaker.

February 16, 2010

Tris Speaker's .314 Buff BA in 1907 Led the Texas League.

Tris Speaker hailed from Hubbard, Texas. He grew up playing baseball at the turn of the 20th century, a time when great contact hitters and fielders with built- radar screens for flying things did not go nameless for long among the early bush-beating scouts in the boondocks. Add to Speaker’s resume his intelligence, speed, baseball intuition, and quickness of mind and body reaction to events on the field. Speaker had it all.

He played his first season at age 18 for the Cleburne Railroaders of the Texas League. He batted only .268 with one homer in 82 games, but it was a pitcher’s league and a pitching season. Teammate George Whiteman led the league in hitting that season with an average of only .284. On defense, Speaker shone bright and true in the outfield from early on. He could catch anything in the air that was humanly reachable.

In 1907, the Houston Buffs celebrated their return to the Texas League from four years of toil in the South Texas League by signing Speaker for their club. Speaker promptly used the opportunity to become a 19-year old batting champion. His .314 mark led all others. and his 32 doubles and 12 triples shone forth as a preview of things to come. For the time, they were good enough to prompt his sale late in the season to the Boston American League club.

Speaker hit a buck fifty-eight in 19 times at bat for the 1907 Boston Americans, who then turned around and sold his contract to Little Rock in 1908. Speaker responded by hitting .350 in 127 games for Little Rock and the Bostons bought him back near season’s end. He only hit .224 in 31 games as a 1908 Boston tail-ender, but the corner had been turned. Tris Speaker would see the underside of .300 only twice more in his next twenty years of major league play.

He would leave the game with 3,514 hits over 22 major league seasons (1902-1928), a lifetime batting average of .345, and the all time baseball record for doubles at 792. He won a batting championship by hitting .386 for Cleveland in 1916 and he won a World Series as playing manager of the Indians in 1920. He earlier won two World Series as a player for the 1912 and 1915 Boston Red Sox.

As a fielder, Speaker was renown for playing shallow because of his ability to go back and get the long ball.  He also holds the record for most unassisted double plays performed by a center fielder over a lifetime career. His 449 career assist also are a record for big league outfielders.

The achievements are two numerous to list. These are the amazing ones to me: (1) the man batted over .380 five times; and (2) he struck out only 220 times in 10,195 times at bat in the big leagues. Tris Speaker was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937 – a full two years before the place even opened to the public and became physically prepared to conduct its first 1939 induction ceremony.

Without a doubt in my mind, The Grey Eagle is the greatest former Houston Buff of all time. Dizzy Dean is my choice as second man on that very short, but very special list.

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My St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Lineup!

February 13, 2010

Chicagoland: Vote Early! Vote Often! Vote for Al's Guy!

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Spring’s coming soon,

And baseball is too!

While we’re staring out the window at those ashen gray skies, fighting the cold dampness and awaiting the return of all that’s sweet about life, here’s a St. Valtentine’s Day lineup that’s designed to massacre the off-season blues with our love of the game. All the players on this special team are former major leaguers who mostly have passed the “ya gotta have heart” test.

The St. Valentine’s Day Love Massacre Lineup:

Pitcher: Slim Love (BL/TL) (28-21, 3.04) (1913-1920)

Catcher: Rick Sweet (BB/TR) (.234, 6 HR) (1978, 1982-1983)

First Base: Cupid Childs (BL/TR) (.306, 20 HR) (1888, 1890-1901)

Second Base: Bobby Valentine (BR/TR) (.260, 12 HR) (1969, 1971-1979)

Third Base: Jim Ray Hart (BR/TR) (.278, 170 HR) ((1963-1974)

Shortstop: Jake Flowers ((BR/TR) (.256, 16 HR) (1923, 1926-1934)

Left Field: Pete Rose (BB/TR) (.303, 4,256 career hits) (1963-1986)

Center Field: Bob Bowman (BR/TR) (.249, 129 career hits) (1955-1959)

Right Field: Moonlight Graham (BL/TR) (1 Game, 0 At Bats) (1905)

Manager: Bobby Valentine doubles as playing manger. His overly qualified back-up at second base, Cupid Childs, is too Valentine-cool not to play, so he is assigned to play first base for our club. Meanwhile, after a 105-year wait, Moonlight Graham gets a chance with this club to finally to take his first time at bat in the big leagues. How romantic is that?

Happy Valentine’s Day, Everybody! And don’t forget to treat your Special Sweetie nice on Sunday, February 14th!

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The Father of the Texas League.

February 11, 2010

John J. McCloskey: Father of the Texas League & 1st Houston Pennant Manager.

As we’ve recently examined on these pages, professional baseball got off to a rough start with the 1888 Texas League season. Ballparks had to be built; patterns of regular game attendnce had to be established; players had to be signed and paid; weather and transportation had to cooperate so that games could be played on time as advertised; and ball club owners had to devise ways of making all this happen without losing money.

How this all happened over time is a total testament to patience, will, passion, and the power of professional baseball to become the first American sport to win over the hearts and minds of the American public. It didn’t come as easy as the “if you build it, they will come” exhortation from the movie “Field of Dreams”,  but it happened in Texas too, thanks to numerous pioneers, and none more notable of mention than John J. McCloskey, the man we remember today as “The Father of the Texas League”.

It all started innocently enough.

In the early fall of 1887, the world champion St. Louis Browns of Charlie Comiskey and the New York Giants of John Montgomery Ward toured Texas, mostly playing local amateur town teams that possessed only that “snowball-in-hell” chance of winning. None did.

Another team of younger minor league stars from Joplin, Missouri also came through Texas at this time and just “happened” to intersect with the Giants in Austin. The Joplins were led by a “black-haired lively young Irishman” named John J. McCloskey. In little time flat, McCloskey had arranged for a series of three games in Austin, pitting his Joplins against the Giants for what promised to be the biggest crowds that either team had seen in their separate barnstorming tours.

It was the perfect wild west scenario – a gunfight between the old established gunslinger (the Giants) and Billy the Kid (the Joplins). We don’t know today how much McCloskey played up that angle, but it would be very surprising to learn that he did not. From what we can know of the man, he was a fellow who loved baseball, but one who also possessed that P.T. Barnum huckster spirit for selling whatever angle he could find that would lure crowds to the game.

In spite of three future Hall of Fame members (John Montgomery Ward, Buck Ewing, and Tim Keefe), the Giants quickly dropped two games to the young and spirited men of Joplin. For some reason, weather or travel plan conflicts entering into it, the third game was not played and the Giants left town.

The smoke that lingered in Austin after the Giants-Joplin games included a taste for the blood offerings of professional baseball and the willing guidance of one John J McCloskey on how a Texas League of Professional Baseball Clubs could be put together fairly quickly.

McCloskey and his young Joplin aces gave Austin supporters the nucleus for a good club as “Big John” and his group spread out to all the other larger cities in the state, and as far away as New Orleans, and they recruited participants in the formation of the Texas League.

The Texas League got underway in 1888. The rest is history, shaky history, but successful history over time. The unchallenged, clearest thing about it is that John J. McCloskey, indeed, was the true Father of the Texas League. His baseball DNA is all over every park built for play in the Texas League from 1887 through about 1900.

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In The Big Inning …

February 10, 2010

Houston's Baseball Tree Was Not Without Buffaloes Forever.

In the 1861 beginning of Houston “Base Ball”, there were no Buffaloes, no paychecks, and no players. Organized several weeks beyond the Texas secession from the Union, base ball had to wait for the end of the Civil War before it really took off as the most popular sport in town, but the seeds of love for the game had been planted early.

Contrary to popular theory, Houston already knew about baseball prior to the Civil War. It was not one of those southern cities that only learned about baseball through the experiences of returning Confederate veterans who had been exposed to the game as prisoners of war.

Remember. Houston’s founders, the Allen brothers, came here from New York in 1836. They brought with them other New Yorkers and they continued to attract new settlers from the northeast section of the country that was already involved in the evolution of baseball. For all we know, the first Houstonians may have been playing some kind of baseball from the very start, and certainly from beyond the 1845 date of the Cartwright-rules game that came into fashion on the Elysian Fields of New Jersey. It is most unlikely that the founding group that met in the upstairs room above J.H. Evans Store in Market Square on the night of April 16, 1861 had never played a single game of base ball on Houston soil prior to that evening.

If only F.A. Rice were here for five to ten minutes borrowed time from his eternal tour of eternity beyond the grave, he could clear up  lot of questions for us. F.A. Rice was the man the new HBBC elected as their first president on that now documented date of the group’s formation. He could clear up so much for us with even a few nods of the head. Unfortunately, that’s not how this thing works.

All we know for sure from that little newspaper clipping about the April 1861 foundation of the Houston Base Ball Club is that organized interest in the game existed in Houston at least as early as the beginning of the great Civil War.

Unfortunately, the graves and their occupants cannot be summoned to help us flesh out most of the unreported details.

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Seems Like Old Times.

February 8, 2010

Buff Stadium in Middle Right of Gulf Freeway, Early 1950s.

It was located four miles east of downtown Houston. When its first Opening Day came around on April 11, 1928, many Houstonians still grumbled over the fact that Buffalo Stadium, the new baseball home of the Houston Buffs had been built so far out in the sticks from the city. West End Park, after all, had been right there on Andrews Street, off Smith, near where almost everybody lived back in the booming 1920s. The old park may have found its way to some  dilapidation and it may have offered  inadequate seating capacity, but it was close. And close counted for something back in the pre-freeway days.

The city had rallied to the travel problem by making sure that rail service to the new ballpark from downtown was easy to use. Union Station, the current home site of Minute Maid Mark, in fact, was one primary place to catch the ballgame  train that went out to Buff Stadium on what was then known as St. Bernard Avenue in 1928. That same thoroughfare is called Cullen Boulevard these days. It’s been Cullen so long now that hardly anyone alive still remembers it by its earlier identity.

Buff Stadium was the brain child of Cardinals General Manager Branch Rickey. Buffs President Fred Ankenman oversaw the ballpark’s construction in 1927-28, bringing in the project on budget at a cost of $400,000 much harder dollars then the kind we see today. Mr. Rickey even came down from St. Louis on the train to attend the 1928 grand opening of the new ballpark in Houston and he brought Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis with him. Judge Landis was most impressed too, pronouncing the new Buff Stadium as the finest new minor league baseball park in America.

Landis’s favorable impressions were important to Rickey. Rickey hoped to soften the old man’s heart from the idea that major league ownership of minor league clubs was bad business for the local community. The original 8,000 seat Buff Stadium stood as a symbol of progress and improvement in Houston minor league baseball under Cardinal ownership. To some extent, Rickey had accomplished his mission in bringing Landis to Houston in April 1928. Nothing ever really cured the contentious relationship between these two men, as Rickey would learn years later when Landis freed Pete Reiser and a few others from reserve clause capture by the St. Louis Cardinals, but that’s a story for another day.

Look at the Houston skyline in the picture. The Gulf and Esperson buildings were still the icons of Houston architecture in the 1950s – and that freeway and its rascally pal roadways had only begun to play their role in Houston’s massive spread to the hinterlands.

The Houstonians of 1928 thought that the four-mile trip to Buff Stadium from downtown was a major expedition. Today we drive four miles just to reach a Whataburger or rent a DVD movie. So where’s all this progress we keep talking about?

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1914 Houston Buffs: Texas League Co-Champs.

February 7, 2010

I especially love doing a baseball story on Super Bowl Sunday morning!

The 1914 Buffs at Union Station. Today they would be standing on the 3rd base line of Minute Maid Park in downtown Houston, Texas.

The 1914 Houston Buffaloes won 102 and lost 50, good enough to tie the Waco Navigators as the almost endlessly arguable co-champions of the Texas League after s series of post-game protests between the two clubs left them knotted in a first place tie with the same regular season record. Unfortunately, in the middle of all the legalese, ego, and other technical in-fighting, a playoff suggestion to settle the matter never broke out. As a result, the two were left to swarm on a tie that would be debated back and forth forever. Here’s the best summary I can provide you from the bit of fuzzy explanation left to us by the leaague’s erstwhile historian Willam Ruggles in “The History of the Texas League” from 1950.

Waco had been trying all summer to have one Houston win thrown out on a technicality. In a June 26th first game of a doubleheader at Houston, Austin trailed 9-1 at the end of seven innings. The visitors agreed to call the game then for the sake of saving daylight for the second contest, even though Texas League rules at the time dictated tat all first games of a DH must go nine frames to be official. The game was protested by Waco and, on September 7th, Texas League President W.R. Davidson threw the game out as a win for Houston, but he did not provide for any replay of the contest as prescribed by the rules at that time. Had the win not been taken away, Houston could have tied Waco with the same record.

Never fear. Houston got that tie, but they did it in the same way that Waco put a hole in Houston’s pennant hopes. They protested and won a verdict against Waco for using a new player too late in the season, as described by the Texas League roster rules for 1914. The win stripped Waco of a win and left them tied with Houston for the Texas League pennant. Perhaps the idea of a playoff between Houston and Waco was thwarted by the fear of further protests over whatever might have happened in an additional game.

The books closed on 1914 with Houston and Waco both finishing at 102 wins and 50 losses.

1914 was another quirky year in the Texas League. Last place Austin’s ownership was chastised early in the summer for not trying hard enough to win and for the frivolous firing of good players who may have been making too much money to please Austin owner Quebodeaux. The roster had a revolving door that almost spun its way out of control. “We tell ’em hello in the morning,” said Austin pitcher Ross Helms, “and we kiss ’em goodbye at night,” he added.

At one point, Austin lost 31 games in a row, a figure that also turned out to be their season win. The Capitol City boys finished last in the Texas League in 1914 with a record of 31 wins and 114 losses.

The only common ground that this article shares with the Super Bowl is this one: If someone wants to know who won the Texas League pennant in 1914, the only safe answer is this one:

Who dat?

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