The Pecan Park Eagle

Bob Fenner, Catcher
Beeville, Texas
13-Year ..310 Minor League Hitter.

Bob Fenner is another of those legendary (to me) Beeville natives that brought their talents to baseball and that I learned about as a kid from my father. At 6’01” and 210 pounds, catcher Bob Fenner was a pretty big man for his time and place. He was born in my birth town of Beeville, Texas on August 14, 1907. I’m not sure when he died, but I am more than reasonably certain that he is not still walking the earth at age 106, as suggested by Baseball Reference (dot) Com. [UPDATE: Contributor Bill Hickman has now later confirmed that Bob Fenner died on March 1. 1984 at the age of 76 as a resident of Corpus Christi, a city located 50 miles south of his native Beeville.]

Fenner’s name came to mind this past weekend when friend and fellow researcher Darrell Pittman sent me the following article from the July 23, 1902 edition of the Houston Post Dispatch:

The Fenner  referenced in the article as the catcher for Beeville almost certainly had to have been a relative and I’m betting it was his father, even before I have a chance to do further research. We shall see, but, with two men named Fenner from the small burg of Beeville being known as catchers over the course of two successive generations, “father-son” jumps to the front as the greatest probability as the basis for their connection.

My dad, who was also born in Beeville in 1910, three years after Bob Fenner, never mentioned his father – or the possibility that he had been a second generation catcher, but that is not unusual. Young people have been dismissing or ignoring things that happened prior to their own times forever. What is unusual is that my dad, and my newspaper man grandfather, were both great historians of Beeville and its people. I’m also betting my dad also knew of the elder Fenner and that the information simply got lost on me until now.

For most of his 13-season, predominantly higher minor league playing career (1927-38, 1940), catcher Bob Fenner played superior ball as a hitter. His career average was .310 with 58 home runs. We have no answer this morning as to how close he ever came to a major league shot, if at all, but these were the reserved clause days, when the rich big league teams also won by keeping potential MLB talent away from their poorer competitors. Bob Fenner hit well over .300 in four of his ten years with AA-level St. Paul (1928-37), batting .301 in 1929, .391 in 1930,  .330 in 1932, and .337 in 1933. Bob retired after the 1938 season, but came back in 1940 to give it one more whack for Class D Sioux Falls. All he did was hit .344 at age 33 in 107 games at catcher.

In 12 seasons as a catcher and one as an outfielder for Laredo in 1927, Fenner posted fielding averages of .978 and .963.

Thanks for bringing the man back to mind, Darrell Pittman.

Base Ball To Day
Beeville, Texas
About 1910

My grandfather took the above photo from the front door of his Beeville Bee newspaper office on Washington Street in Beeville, Texas. Our best current guess is that the photo was taken around 1910. That would have been the first of Beeville’s two season membership (1910-11) as the Orange  Growers in the Class D Southwest Texas League. The enthusiasm for ball at an organized level would help to explain the Chamber of Commerce treatment that Beeville was showering upon the game with an across-the-street banner. In case you cannot see it well, it reads as “Base Ball To Day.”

Base Ball To Day Scene
Beeville, Texas, 2001
by Bill McCurdy

Hope you enjoy “then and now photos.” Shortly after the turn of the 21st century, I took the above photo from the same doorway perspective that my grandfather used to take his shot of “Base Ball To Day”  nearer the turn of the 20th century in downtown Beeville.

Hope you also enjoyed another short trip to Beeville for the sake of calling to mind another pretty fair country ballplayer-catcher named Bob Fenner.