The Pecan Park Eagle

Searching for the Houston Apaches!
(Personified here by an oil canvas that a cousin, Myrtle Hunt, painted back in the 1930s.)

Who were the Houston Apaches baseball team?

The question came up this week when an  e-mail from friend and fellow baseball history lover Darrell Pittman passed it along to me in behalf of someone who had written to him with the very same query. We don’t, or I don’t, even know who this stranger was, but that’s OK. – The question had been raised and neither Darrell nor I, nor anyone else so invited, knew the answer beyond the wild guessing stage. It was pretty easy to surmise, if they did once exist, that they played at the myriad sub-fully professional organized baseball level as either an amateur club, or one with a few compensated in some way player or players, or otherwise, as a full-blown semi-pro team.

The basic question about their existence was easy enough to confirm. The Pecan Park Eagle used their digital News Archival website program to find numerous references to games played and announced for the Houston Apaches from 1948 through 1960, mostly from reports in the Galveston Daily News, but a few from the Baytown Sun. (Our website resource, unfortunately, doe not include the archives of Houston print news sources at this time.)

Here’s a small sample of what we’ve learned about the Houston Apaches, so far, from an era in which political correctness was not even in play as a commonly understood expression. If “Apaches” offends any of you readers as a club nickname, let’s see if your adroitness on this subject will find the one among these few stories that pales all others: