The Pecan Park Eagle

The 1910 Beeville Orange Growers
Southwest Texas League
1910-11

The Southwest Texas League: It started with the best of intentions

The Class D Southwest Texas League lasted only two years back in 1910-11. Its six teams included the Bay City Rice Eaters, the Beeville Orange Growers, the Brownsville Brownies, the Corpus Christi Pelicans, the Laredo Bermudas, and the Victoria Rosebuds. Brownsville won the 1910 pennant and was awarded a beautiful trophy as their reward. Beeville won the 1911crown when playoff opponent Bay City refused to play them in a championship series due to some still live grievances the Bay Citians held for Beeville and the behavior of their fans. By this time, all unresolved team feuds were moot to the fact that the league was now busted financially and out of business. Before the final death rattle, the league office tried to retrieve the championship trophy from Brownsville so they could transfer it to the 1911 winner. Brownsville reacted firmly, in effect, sending the league this message: “The 1910 trophy belongs to Brownsville. Go buy another one for this year’s winner.” It never happened. Beeville did not win their championship on the field. And their was no money left for a new one, anyway. The trophy and the league were done.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

W.O. McCurdy
Publisher/Editor
The Beeville Bee
1886-1913

It’s easy to make an unscientific case for the usual reasons for failure. When human organizations of any kind are governed by the driving forces of ego, greed, and a lack of concern for others, things can go bad fast. The variables attendant to keeping baseball trusted and credible also kick in like mules. Not surprisingly, gambling and drinking figured into the failures of trust and integrity between participating towns. Here’s what my grandfather, William O. McCurdy I, Publisher and Editor of the Beeville Bee (1886-1913), wrote about the situation following a three-game sweep of the visitors from Beeville down in Brownsville in 1911, as quoted in this re-print from the Victoria Advocate:

“As was expected, the Orange Growers lost all three games to the Brownies. Gambling on baseball has certainly played havoc with baseball as a clean sport. The national game is all right as long as all gambling is prohibited, and all who best on the game should be prosecuted. This condition is not so bad in Beeville as it is in the Rio Grande cities. Down there they bet a good sum of money and are going to do their best to win that money, whether they do so fairly or otherwise. These umpires are easily bribed and many a good ball team loses a ball game because the umpire is receiving a commission. One umpire can win more games than a lot full of Ty Cobbs.” – W.O. McCurdy, Beeville Bee, as quoted in the Victoria Advocate, 4/22/11.

Grandfather McCurdy was also convinced that baseball scouts who doubled as game umpires were also subject to calling balls and strikes in favor of the players they represented. If the umpire/agent’s client was the batter, he was likely to draw a four pitch walk. If the pitcher was the umpire-man’s client, he had a good chance of getting a three called strike “K” by pitching way inside or way outside. We may only suppose that things then got as fair as possible only when the umpire was the representative for both pitcher and batter – and he had no team money behind his game-calling choices.

Other complaints about play in the SWT League included widespread fan rowdyism and drinking at games that often spilled onto the field as fighting between home crowds and visiting teams, poor gate proceeds, and clubs missing paydays of their players due to the lack of funds.

Failure to Communicate

Base Ball Today
Beeville, Texas
Early 20th Century

 It happened when the league and Brownsville ran into different understandings about the temporary/permanent presence of the championship trophy down in the Valley town in 1910, and it happened again, big time, when Victoria withdrew from the league in 1911 because of what they felt was a blanket bias against their city by the other teams in the circuit. When they tried to reclaim their $500 deposit that all clubs had been required to put up at the start, they learned that only $100 was coming back to them because most of these monies had been used to help Corpus Christi make payroll and to take care of other unspecified league office expenses. There had been no clear discussion or written contract set up for how the deposit money could be used when it was collected.

Grandfather McCurdy chose a newspaper masthead that bore the full weight of his great expectations. He once wrote that “a newspaper must never grow larger than its search for the truth”. I’ve always liked knowing that fact about the grandfather I never got to meet.

Goodbye, Southwest Texas League!

Beeville did enjoy having future UT great Coach Billy Disch join them as Manager of the Orange Growers for most of the 1911 season, but even that cherished figure could not offset the climate that killed this effort to cultivate organized baseball in South Texas. Sadly for my dad and me, Grandfather McCurdy died of tuberculosis in 1913. My dad had to grow up from age 3 without him. And I never even had the chance to know him – except through his 27 years of writing for The Beevile Bee.

Hello, Native Major Leaguers!

In spite of the SWTL failure, the 3,062 people who made up the population of Beeville in 1920 apparently had a baseball gene running through their bloodlines. Shortly before and after 1920, three native sons of Beeville had gone on to successful careers in the big leagues. They were Melvin “Bert” Gallia, RHP, Curtis “Curt” Walker, OF, and Lloyd “Lefty” Brown, LHP. For more information, check out this earlier column I wrote on the total history of organized baseball in my birthplace of Beeville, Texas on 6/26/2012. I have a little clearer idea today of what went amiss in the SWTL, but this is still a nice survey of organized baseball history in the place that is now a city of 14,000 people.

https://thepecanparkeagle.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/professional-baseball-in-beeville-texas/

Have a nice day!