Four Hundred Hitters, Home Run Barrages, and Jim Crow: The Post-War Bush Leagues in Texas, 1946-61

The East All-Stars for the 1953 Longhorn League All-Star game played July 25 In Midland, Texas. Front row from left, John Malgarini of San Angelo, Roger Dalla Betta of Midland, Scooter Hughes of Midland, John Tayoan of San Angelo, and Barney Batson of Odessa. Second row from left, Joe Riney of Big Spring, Art Bowland of Midland, Glenn Groomes of Big Spring, Glenn Burns of San Angelo, Julio De la Torre of Midland. Back row from left, Mario Saldana of San Angelo, Ben Bonine of San Angelo, Jim Carson of Odessa, Bobby Gregg of San Angelo, and Rudy Briner of San Angelo. (Author’s collection)

 

Texas has always been a baseball bastion, with more of its towns represented in the history of so-called “Organized Baseball”—at least 102—than any other state.1 The post-war baseball boom not only revitalized the Texas League, lower classification circuits also sprang up around the state. The result was some amazing performances, both good and bad. Home runs flew out of ballparks, especially in West Texas, and earned run averages soared. Many of the stats from the era read more like one would expect from slow pitch softball.

For example, the Class C West Texas-New Mexico league began a ten-year run in 1946 with Joe Bauman of the Amarillo Gold Sox slugging 48 home runs and driving in 159 runs in a 140-game season.2 With teammate Bob Crues, Bauman would form one of the greatest power hitting tandems in minor league history in 1946-47, hitting a combined total of 167 home runs in those two years with Amarillo.3 Quanah, Texas’ Bill Evans—who would later have cups of coffee with the White Sox and Red Sox—went 26-7 in 1946 for the Gold Sox while future big leaguer Warren Hacker recorded a 20-4 line for the Pampa Oilers, who edged out the Gold Sox for second place.4 At the other end of the standings, the Lamesa Lobos won only 36 of 140 games and finished 62½. games behind the pennant-winning Abilene Blue Sox. On June 8, the Lobos set a record for futility by losing to Amarillo 32-0.5

The East Texas League made a one-year appearance in 1946, also at the Class C level. The highlight was undoubtedly the comeback of former major league hurler Monty Stratton who won 18 games against 8 losses for the Sherman Twins. Stratton, raised on a farm near Greenville, pitched with an artificial leg—the result of a hunting accident eight years before—which had ended a promising big-league career.6 Hollywood took note and Stratton was paid a reported $100,000 for the rights to his story, which resulted in a 1949 movie called The Stratton Story starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson.7

The post-war rise in lower-level minor league baseball in Texas was due in part to the passion, energy, and creativity of men like Howard Green. A native of Swenson in West Texas, Green served as a gunner on a B-24 during the war and returned with the goal of owning and operating a franchise in the West Texas-New Mexico League. Before the 1946 season, he put together a small investment group and founded the Abilene Blue Sox, even though professional baseball had failed three times in Abilene. He secured an affiliation with the Brooklyn Dodgers, which provided the Blue Sox with prospects like first baseman (and future big-league manager) Danny Ozark (31 homers, 142 RBIs, .325 batting average), Leo Thomas (.363 batting average) and player-manager William Greer (.358 BA with 131 RBIs). Pitchers John Hall (20-9), William Werbowski (20-7), Ken Olsen (19-7), Richard Tross (16-3), and Joe Tysko (13-2) were stellar on the mound as the Blue Sox compiled a 97-40 record and finished with the second highest winning percentage in baseball.8

Green wasn’t content with the success of the Blue Sox and organized an entirely new league for 1947, the Class D Longhorn League with franchises in Odessa, Midland, Big Spring, Ballinger, Sweetwater, and Vernon to become, at age 25, the youngest league president in history. Although there were many naysayers, the Longhorn League lasted until 1955. Pat Stasey, a native of Stephenville, batted a cool .416 for Big Spring in the league’s first year, driving in 153 runs in 123 games. Stasey didn’t even win the batting title as James Prince of the Midland Indians batted an incredible .429 for the season. Stasey would play in the league for nine years, only once batting below .341.

The 30-year-old Stasey was Big Spring’s manager and part-owner and, funding the team with his own money, hit upon a plan to recruit light-skinned Cuban players to stock his roster. Cubans were happy to play for lower salaries and were not subject to the US military draft, which ramped up with the Korean Conflict. From 1947 through 1952 the Broncs were made up largely of Cuban players, who made Big Spring a lower minor league powerhouse. Stacey’s Big Spring teams won three pennants, finished second twice, and third once in six years.9 In 1949 the Broncs won the regular season pennant by 20½ games and then swept the playoffs by winning eight games without a loss. Future big league pitchers Camilo Pascual, Mike Fornieles, and Raul Sanchez all got their start with Big Spring, as did Camilo’s older brother, Carlos “Potato” Pascual, who was such an exciting two-way player for the Broncs that he jumped from Class D directly to the major league Washington Nationals at age 19.10

The first Longhorn League season in 1947 was marred by the death of Ballinger Cats outfielder James “Stormy” Davis, who was struck in the head by a pitched ball in Sweetwater on July 3. He died seven days later of a brain hemorrhage. The twenty-year-old Davis, whose roommate was Bonham native and future big-league shortstop Roy McMillan, was considered a bona fide prospect and was batting .333, with 19 homers, and 59 RBIs in just 48 games at the time of his fatal injury.11

The West Texas-New Mexico League cemented its reputation as the top hitters’ league in baseball in 1947 as Lubbock swept to the pennant by 14 games over Amarillo, averaging almost nine runs a game.12 The Hubbers were led by 5’9”, 175-pound future Chicago Cub Bill Serena, who played shortstop, clubbed 57 home runs, and drove in 190 while batting .374. In 14 September playoff games, Serena hit 13 more taters, for a total of 70 for the year.13 Borger’s Leon Cato batted a lusty .410 to lead the league. The league had some quality pitching, however, as William “Lefty” Jones went 24-4 for Lamesa while Paul Hinrichs, who would later have a cup of coffee with the Red Sox, was 18-5 for the Hubbers with a league-leading 3.34 earned run average.14

The Class C Lone Star League began a two-year run in 1947 with franchises in East Texas cities such as Kilgore, Longview, Tyler, Marshall, Jacksonville, and Lufkin. John Stone of the Henderson Oilers won the Triple Crown with a .396 batting average, 32 homers, and 185 runs batted in. Perhaps the low point came in July when a game in Bryan was interrupted in the fifth inning when a snake slithered into right field.15

The Class B Big State League also began an eleven-year run in 1947 with teams like the Paris Red Peppers, the Greenville Majors, the Gainesville Owls, and Texarkana Bears, among others. Vern Washington of the Bears batted .404 to lead the league, while Chicota’s Buck Frierson of the Sherman-Denison Twins smashed 58 homers and drove in 197 runs to complete an eye-popping campaign. D.C. “Pud” Miller of Wichita Falls was right behind with 57 homers and 196 runs batted in. On August 17 Frierson peaked with three home runs and eight runs driven in, all against Monty Stratton of the Waco Dons, who went the distance in absorbing the 16-14 loss.16

The following year, 1948, saw more gargantuan performances in the West Texas-New Mexico League as six of the eight teams batted over .300 for the season.17 Bob Crues of Celina, Texas, tied a record in affiliated baseball by clouting 69 home runs, up from 52 the previous year.18 He also drove in an unbelievable 254 runs in 140 games and batted .404, which was only the third highest average in the league.19 Crues had lost his right index finger in a childhood accident and had broken in as a pitcher, winning 20 games in 1940 for the Lamesa Lobos before learning to hit at Camp Hood while serving in the military. After the war, he switched to the outfield and was rediscovered by Gold Sox owner/manager Bob Seeds.20

The league’s sluggers augmented their monthly paychecks by “fence” money that fans stuck into the chicken-wire screens after home runs. Crues hit 41 of his 69 home runs at home and on the night he hit number 69 he was said to have gone home with about $400 in bills stuck through the screen and another $300 in change dropped into two-gallon buckets that were passed around the stands. It was about double his monthly $375 salary.21

In 1947 and 1948 the league also had Len Glica, a popular teenage second baseman for the Abilene Blue Sox. Glica moved up to Class B in 1949 and 1950 before he was drafted due to the Korean Conflict. Sadly, he was killed in action on May 26, 1951, only four days after arriving in the war zone. He was just 22 years old and the second professional baseball player to die in Korea.22

The Lone Star League was beset with bad luck in 1948 when, within the space of nine days in August, ballparks in Tyler and Henderson were destroyed by fire. Kilgore’s Joe Kracher batted .433 to lead the minors (and majors). In the far-flung Longhorn League, a June 20 game in Vernon between the Vernon Dusters and Del Rio Cowboys was called off because of travel fatigue.23

By 1949 the Lone Star League had faded into history, but Frank Saucier of the Wichita Falls Spudders in the Big State League gained national attention by hitting .446 to win the Hillerich & Bradsby Silver Slugger Award as the top hitter in the minor leagues.24 It was the highest season batting average up until that point in the history of affiliated baseball. In the hitters paradise that was the West Texas-New Mexico League, Lamesa’s Pud Miller broke the 50-homer barrier for the second time by slamming 52 four-baggers—all the more remarkable because he missed the first 31 games of the league season while he suited up for the Glade-water Bears in the East Texas League.25 Miller also batted .404, trailing only Roberto Fernandez of Abilene, whose .408 average led the league.

Miller was a 6’2”, right-handed slugger who tried to launch one on every trip to the plate, mostly to reap the financial rewards from fans sticking cash in the fence after a round-tripper. Soon after T-bone—as he was known locally—joined Lamesa, he slugged four straight home runs but was unhappy because he reaped only $149 for the evening. The next day he threatened to leave the team unless team president Horace Duke gave him $100, so Duke went to the bank and got a $100 bill and handed it over. Surprisingly, when Miller returned to his hometown, Hickory, North Carolina, he praised the generosity of the Lamesa fans, saying he got as much as $150 for a homer and never less than $35.26

The Rio Grande Valley League began a two-year run in 1949, first as a Class D circuit and then advancing to Class C in 1950. The latter year Jess McClain had a gargantuan season for Harlingen with 53 home runs, 173 runs batted in, and a .356 batting average to lead the Capitols to the pennant by a single game over the Laredo Apaches. Lloyd Pearson of the Corpus Christi Aces hit .383 to win the batting title while driving in 154 runs, second to McClain. Gonzales’ Dick Midkiff, who had appeared briefly for the Boston Red Sox in 1938, won 22 games for the Del Rio Cowboys. When several teams, led by Corpus Christi and including Harlingen, Brownsville, and Laredo, jumped to the Class B Gulf Coast League for 1951, the league was forced to discontinue operations.27

Mansfield, Texas, native Roy Parker had a dual threat season to remember in 1950 for Pampa in the West Texas-New Mexico League, leading the Oilers to the regular season pennant by posting 27 wins on the mound. When not pitching, Parker played left field, batting .346 for the year with 21 home runs. Joe Fortin, however, led the team in batting average with a .401 batting average and led the league with 236 hits and 171 RBIs in 145 games.28 Oilers’ catcher Jim Martin narrowly escaped tragedy on April 28 when knocked unconscious by lightning in a game in Abilene. The bolt launched his catcher’s mask 20 feet past the pitcher’s mound, but Martin was back behind the plate the next evening. In August the Abilene Blue Sox tried wearing new style shorts for two games to try to beat the heat, but quickly abandoned the experiment because of mosquitoes.29

In the Class B Big State League, the Texarkana Bears swept to the pennant by 11½ games over the second place Gainesville Owls thanks in large part to Rice University alum Frank Carswell who batted an even .400, improving over his .386 batting average for the Bears in 1949. Milan Vucelich helped mightily with 144 runs batted in to lead the league. Down in Class D, the Odessa Oilers won their first Longhorn League pennant by seven and a half games, led by player-manager Alex Monchak, the all-league second baseman.

In 1951 in the Class C Longhorn League, Dean Franks chalked up 30 wins for the Roswell Rockets, who still finished third behind the San Angelo Colts. Nineteen-year-old Mike Fornieles led the second-place Big Spring Broncs with a 17-6 record and a league leading 2.85 earned run average. He made his big-league debut with the Washington Nationals the following year at age 20 to begin a 12-year major league career. Pat Stacey, then 34 years old, again led the league in batting with a lofty .384 average.

In the same circuit, 46-year-old rubber-armed Texan Earl Caldwell, a veteran of eight major league seasons, won 19 games (against only six losses) for the Harlingen Capitols and led the league with a 2.22 earned run average. Caldwell followed in 1952 with a 20-11 record and a 2.74 ERA and won 11 and 12 games the next two seasons, both with sparkling earned run averages to cap off a minor league career that spanned 24 seasons and included 302 wins.31

Outfielder Glenn Burns of the Lamesa Lobos in the West Texas-New Mexico League had a mammoth year in 1951, batting .392 with 197 RBIs in 141 games. Lamesa, however, made much bigger waves when manager Jay Haney signed two African American players, John Wingate of Beaumont and Connie Heard of Texas City, in spite of considerable local opposition. Although Heard did not make the team, Wingate did as a shortstop. He began the year by hitting safely in his first six games and the so-called Negro (segregated) stands were full in what was still very much the Jim Crow south. Overall attendance declined, however, as many Whites stopped attending and after just 27 games in which Wingate batted .250, he was released.32

As the decade wore on, the lower classifications struggled financially, but were home to some incredible performances and unusual events. For example, in 1952 Patricio Lorenzo batted .415 to lead the West Texas-New Mexico League and was traded mid-season from the Lamesa Lobos to the Borger Gassers. Joe Bauman, playing for Artesia, New Mexico, terrorized pitchers in the Longhorn League with 50 home runs and 157 runs batted in. The Big Spring Broncs, still relying on Cuban players like Gilberto Guerra who went 26-11, finished in second place, a single game behind the Odessa Oilers. In the Class B Big State League, the Waco Pirates suffered through one of the most futile seasons in minor league history, finishing 56 games out of first place with a 29-118 record, good for a .197 winning average.

Unfortunately, Waco’s luck was even worse in 1953. On May 11 a devastating tornado swept through the city, destroying the business district and Katy Park where the Pirates played. The twister had actually first touched down in San Angelo and then swiftly traveled 190 miles before striking Waco, where it killed 114 people and injured another 597.33 Without a ballpark, the Pirates moved to Longview for the rest of the season. The team improved greatly from the previous year and finished in fourth place with a 77-68 record.

The 1953 season was the swan song for the Gulf Coast League, with Harlingen and Corpus Christi migrating to the Big State League after the league shut down. That final season was a memorable one, however, at least for on-field shenanigans. On June 4 Brownsville Charros manager Stubby Greer threw a flurry of punches at umpire Dick Valencourt and earned a 45-day suspension. Without Greer, on July 13 the Charros scored 17 runs in the second inning of a 25-5 victory over the Corpus Christi Aces. In August the so-called “leaded bat controversy” erupted, with first Port Arthur and then Laredo complaining that the Galveston White Caps, who ran away with the regular season title, were using leaded and “studded” bats with nails driven in.34 Bill Bagwell of Texas City won 26 games, but his Texans still finished eight games behind the suspect White Caps.

The thin air of West Texas and the Panhandle continued to benefit hitters in 1953 as the Plainview Ponies’ Don Stokes batted an amazing .426 with 174 RBIs in 141 games to lead the West Texas-New Mexico League. No one-year wonder, Stokes had batted .384 and .363 the previous two years with Lamesa before the franchise moved to Plainview. In 1954, Stokes again topped the four hundred mark, batting .405 to once more lead the league.35

Also in 1953, Amarillo’s Jim Matthews polled 50 homers while batting a cool .393. Longhorn League hurlers “held” Artesia’s Joe Bauman to 53 home runs. Unseasonably cold weather affected the start of the season for many teams. For example, in the Big State League on April 18, only 30 fans in Tyler braved temperatures in the 40s to witness the Tyler East Texans defeat the Austin Pioneers 5-2.36 Wichita Falls would go on to claim the Big State League pennant and the postseason championship over Tyler. The Spudders were led by outfielder Al Neil, who led the league in five hitting categories, including the triple crown (.356 batting average, 39 home runs, and 137 RBIs).

Joe Bauman brought national attention to the Longhorn League in 1954 when he smashed 72 homers for the Roswell Rockets in 138 games. He went into the last day of the season with 69 circuit clouts and launched three more that day to become the first player in organized baseball to top 70.37 Bauman also batted an even .400 for the year and drove in an astounding 224 runs.38 Making less of a lasting impression but still contributing to the second place Rockets was hometown hero Tom Brookshier, who won seven of eight decisions before leaving for the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, where he would twice make All-Pro.39

In the Big State League, the Waco Pirates were back home in a rebuilt Katy Park. Led by outfielders Jack Falls (.349) and future major leaguer Roman Mejias (.354), the club had a memorable resurgence, winning 105 games against only 42 losses to claim the regular season pennant by 13 games over the Tyler Tigers. The Pirates then won the league playoffs, defeating the Corpus Christi Clippers in seven games in the final round.

The dangers of bus travel in the bush leagues were apparent on May 17 when five members of the Abilene Blue Sox of the West Texas-New Mexico League were hospitalized for carbon monoxide poisoning from gas fumes coming from the team bus.40 On April 23 the following year, dust storms played havoc in the Longhorn League, causing postponements of games in Midland, Big Spring, and Hobbs, New Mexico.41

Plainview Ponies player-manager Jodie Beeler enjoyed the arid weather on August 21, 1955. In a West Texas-New Mexico League doubleheader against the Amarillo Gold Sox in Amarillo, Beeler smoked two home runs in the first game in an 8-6 defeat and four more in the second game in an 18-13 victory. Both games were seven inning affairs, so Beeler smacked his six home runs for the day in only 14 innings of play. Sonny Tims of the Pampa Oilers and the Gold Sox’s Paul Mohr both also hit four homers in a single nine-inning game which for Mohr included 11 runs batted in.42 Plainview’s Isaac Palmer led the league in batting with a .406 average.

In 1956, the Class B Southwestern League replaced the lower classification Longhorn League and the West Texas-New Mexico League with teams in El Paso, Pampa, San Angelo, Plainview, Ballinger, Midland and four New Mexico cities.43 Len Tucker of Pampa batted .404 to lead the league while Plainview’s Forrest “Frosty” Kennedy smashed 60 home runs (with 184 RBIs) to become one of 9 minor leaguers to reach the 60 homer mark. He hit number 60 on the last day of the season against San Angelo. No flash in the pan, Kennedy had batted .410 with 38 homers and 169 RBIs for Plainview in 1953. According to Kennedy, it was tougher to hit 60 homers in the minor leagues than in the majors:

In the Big State League, Wichita Falls player-manager (and future Philadelphia Phillies manager) Danny Ozark had a memorable day by slugging four home runs in a 7-3 triumph over the Beaumont Exporters. Confusion ensued in a game between Lubbock and Beaumont when a combined five players named Smith were in the box score, including three George Smiths. Paris was the lone Texas team competing in the Class D Sooner State League and the Orioles featured Johnny Wartelle, the top fire-baller in the league. Wartelle struck out a loop record 22 batters on May 5 against Seminole and 16 in his next start against Ardmore.45 For the season he struck out 268 batters in 217 innings.

Also in 1956, Amarillo jumped from the defunct West Texas-New Mexico League up to the fast Class A Western League as the only Texas franchise in the league. The Gold Sox promptly won the pennant behind Art Cuitti’s league-leading .364 batting average to go with 46 homers and 139 runs batted in. Thirty-seven-year-old player-manager Chuck Stevens, a former Pacific Coast League star, chipped in with a .334 batting average in 98 games. The Gold Sox finished second the next two years in close pennant races. They were led by Al Pinkston who batted .372 and .337 with 133 and 126 runs batted in 1957 and 1958. Pinkston was a 40-year-old African American who, despite rarely batting below .300 in 16 years in the minor leagues and the Mexican League, never got a real shot with a major league team. According to Gold Sox teammate Clay Dalrymple, who played 12 years in the big leagues, “He could really pop the line drives to all fields—right-center on over to left field. It was just amazing.”46

Year after year the bush leagues continued to dwindle in Texas and throughout the US. Forty-three leagues began the season in 1952 and by 1959 the number was down to only 21.47 The advent and spread of television had a great impact: the Game of the Week with Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner, later replaced by Pee Wee Reese, provided a major league baseball game in living rooms in the hinterlands every Saturday.48

The Big State League hung in there until 1957, and the Longhorn and West Texas-New Mexico Leagues until 1955, while the Gulf Coast League shut down after the 1953 season. The El Paso Texans played in the Arizona-Texas League until the league folded in 1954 and Gainesville, Paris, Greenville, and Sherman/Denison fielded teams sporadically in the Class D Sooner State League, which also lasted until 1957.49 The Paris Orioles won the last Sooner State League regular season pennant by a half game and featured 19-year-old flame-throwing southpaw Steve Barber, who would soon go on to a 15-year big league career. But even the Class A Western League was gone after 1958.

Surprisingly in the face of this downturn, the Class D Sophomore League began a four-year run in 1958 with franchises in San Angelo, Plainview, and Midland to go with three eastern New Mexico outfits. It, too, was a hitters league, as evidenced by Midland’s 15-run second inning in a 19-9 win over Plainview on May 6. Alpine and Odessa joined the league for the 1959 season.

The Alpine Cowboys had been a top-notch semi-pro team for 13 years under the ownership of rancher and baseball mavin Herbert Kokernot, Jr. He had built a beautiful $1.25 million ballpark in Alpine which opened in 1947 and attracted many of the top collegiate players in the country for a summer of high caliber baseball in far West Texas. In 1959, Kokernot decided to try professional baseball and entered into a working agreement with the Boston Red Sox. With a population of 5,261 people, Alpine became the smallest town in the nation with a professional baseball team.50

Officially known as the Big Bend-Davis Mountains Cowboys, the club won their home opener 18-1 over San Angelo and didn’t look back. By mid-season they were 30-6 at home and were clearly the class of the league.51 During one stretch, the Cowboys won 15 games in a row. They raced to the South Division title by an astounding 34 games with an 88-34 record and then swept Hobbs and Carlsbad in the league playoffs. The Cowboys were led by Don Schwall, who posted a 23-6 mound record, and second baseman Chuck Schilling, who batted .340. Just two years later Schwall and Schilling would be starting for the Boston Red Sox and Schwall would be named American League Rookie of the Year after going 15-7.

Jim Crow still reigned in West Texas and eastern New Mexico in the late 1950s and future Hall of Famer Wilver “Willie” Stargell’s experience in the Sophomore League was not atypical. The Pittsburgh Pirates signed the 19-year-old out of the Bay Area for a $1,500 bonus in 1959 and sent him to San Angelo, their Class D affiliate. The team went bankrupt six weeks into the season and abruptly moved to Roswell, where Stargell had difficulty finding a place to live. The team finally located a bed for him in a house rented by a black Air Force Sergeant who was stationed at Walker Air Force Base.

Accommodations on the road for young Wilver were even worse, and were often fold-up beds on the back porches of homes of African American families. For meals, White teammates would bring him sandwiches on the bus, since most restaurants would not serve him. He remembered that in general “people treated me like a dog.”52 A defining moment occurred in Plain-view early one evening when Stargell decided to walk to the ballpark alone from his place of lodging. On Stargell’s way through town, a White man jumped out from an alley, pointed a shotgun at Willie at point blank range, called him a racial epithet, and threatened to shoot him if he played in the game that night. Stargell overcame his fear and played, but never forgot the incident.53

Outfielder Gilbert Carter, another African American, led the league in home runs in 1959 with 34. Playing for the Carlsbad Potashers, he made an indelible impact on August 11 in a contest against the Odessa Oilers. Heading into the bottom of the seventh, the Oilers’ pitcher Wayne Schaper had a 6-0 lead and a no-hitter. Carter ended the shutout and the no-hitter with a run-scoring double. The score was still 6-1 when Carter batted again in the ninth. This time he laid into a fastball and hit one of the longest—if not the longest—home runs in baseball history. The ball cleared the 50-foot light poles behind the fence in left-center field and landed in a yard thought to be about 650 feet from home plate.54 Some estimates had the ball traveling over 700 feet.55 The mammoth blast forged a bond between Carter and Schaper and they kept in touch until Carter passed away in 2015.56

The Sophomore League continued in 1960 and 1961 as the only Texas minor league other than the Texas League. In 1960, however, only Alpine and Odessa were teams from Texas. Alpine, led by 18-year-old shortstop Jim Fregosi, repeated as regular season champions before losing to Hobbs in the playoff final. Fregosi would quickly advance in 1961 to the Triple A Dallas-Fort Worth Rangers and would be the starting shortstop for the major league Los Angeles Angels by the time he was 21.

In 1961 Odessa dropped out of the Sophomore League while the El Paso Sun Kings joined the circuit and finished second to Hobbs. El Paso was led by a seventeen-year-old Cuban named Jose Cardenal, who batted .355 while leading the league in home runs with 35 and driving in 108 runs to finish second in that category. Two years later, a nineteen-year-old Cardenal batted .312 with 36 homers for the Sun Kings after El Paso had joined the Double A Texas League and soon would be on to an 18-year major league career.

The Sophomore League called it quits after 1961, ending the bush league era in Texas.57 The hiatus lasted until the rise of independent, unaffiliated leagues in the 1990s. But it was a time marked by incredible performances on the diamond and segregation off it when baseball was indeed the National Pastime in spite of itself.

PAUL ROGERS III is president of the Ernie Banks-Bobby Bragan (Dallas-Fort Worth) SABR Chapter and the co-author of four baseball books, including The Whiz Kids and the 1950 Pennant written with his boyhood hero Robin Roberts, and Lucky Me: My 65 Years in Baseball authored with Eddie Robinson. He is also co-editor of SABR team histories of the 1951 New York Giants and the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies as well as a frequent contributor to the SABR bio and games projects. His real job is as a law professor at SMU where he was dean of the law school for nine years and has served as the university’s faculty athletic representative for 38 years.

 

Notes

1. Robert Obojski, Bush League: A History of Minor League Baseball (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1975):179. “Organized Baseball” as a historical term refers to the American and National Leagues and all other teams and leagues participating in contractual agreements with those leagues, including minor leagues, team-affiliated “farm teams,” affiliated independent teams, and instructional leagues.

2. Bauman’s RBI total was surpassed by the Borger Gassers’ Gordon Nell who drove in 175 runs.

3. Toby Smith, Bush League Boys—The Postwar Legends of Baseball in the American Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014): 1-24.

4. The Abilene Blue Sox won the pennant by 5½ games with a 97-40 record.

5. Smith, 7.

6. Stratton had won 15 games for the White Sox in both 1937 and 1938 against 5 and 9 losses respectively.

7. Gary Sarnoff, “Monty Stratton,” SABR BioProject at https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/monty-stratton/.

8. David Pietrusza, Minor Miracles—the Legend & Lure of Minor League Baseball (South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, 1995): 49-51.

9. Gaylon H. White, Left on Base in the Bush Leagues: Legends, Near Greats, and Unknowns in the Minors (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2019): 111-34.

10. Carlos Pascual pitched two games for the Nationals late in 1950, winning one and losing one but sporting a 2.12 earned run average on 17 innings. After he reported to the Nationals’ spring training in 1951, he became quite homesick and returned to Cuba where he pitched for several years for the Class B Havana Cubans before injuring his arm. He then continued to play as a position player and eventually returned to play for Pat Stasey with Hobbs in the Longhorn League in 1955 and then with Hobbs and Midland/Lamesa in the Southwestern League in 1956 and 1957. He never returned to the big leagues and played in the minor leagues through 1962. White, 119-20.

11. Pietrusza, 52-53.

12. Clay Coppedge, Texas Baseball: A Lone Star History from Town Teams to the Big Leagues (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012): 63-64.

13. Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Baseball America, Inc., 1997): 366.

14. Smith, 39-41.

15. Johnson and Wolff, 366.

16. Johnson and Wolff, 366.

17. White, 39.

18. Many believed that Crues had actually hit 70 homers. Future big league umpire Frank Secory ruled that a blast Crues hit in Abilene had hit high off the wall and bounced back onto the playing field, but many, including Crues, insisted that the ball had hit the scoreboard above the fence. White, 38-39.

19. Former major leaguers Hershel Martin of Albuquerque and Eddie Carnett of Borger batted .425 and .409 respectively.

20. White, 45.

21. White, 40-41.

22. Smith, 106.

23. Johnson and Wolff, 377.

24. Jim Ball, “Frank Saucier,” SABR BioProject at https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/frank-saucier/.

25. White, 19-20.

26. White, 20-22.

27. Noe Torres, Ghost Leagues: A History of Minor League Baseball in South Texas (Coral Springs, FL: Llumina Press, 2005): 102-3.

28. Future big leaguer Harry Bright of the Clovis Pioneers, however, led the league in hitting with a .413 average.

29. Johnson and Wolff, 399.

30. Torres, 105-11. Rote would play 11 seasons with the football Giants and would retire as the team’s all-time leader in passes caught, receiving yards, and receiving touchdowns. He captained the team for eight of those years.

31. Caldwell compiled a 33-43 record in his eight major league seasons, pitching for the Phillies, Browns, White Sox and Red Sox. His best year was 1946 when he went 13-4 with a 2.08 earned run average for the White Sox.

32. White, 24-28. After serving two years in Korea, Wingate played for two years in the Longhorn and Big State Leagues with limited success before returning to his native Beaumont. Smith, 123-25.

33. Smith, 48-50.

34. A.C. Becker, Jr., “Charges of ‘Leaded Bats,’ Forfeit Stir Up Gulf Coast,” The Sporting News, August 26, 1953: 34.

35. Stokes had earlier played for four years for the Sherman-Denison Twins in the Class B Big State League, batting over .300 in each year.

36. Johnson and Wolff, 427.

37. White, 57-85.

38. The seemingly ubiquitous Pat Stasey was player-manager of Roswell from 1953 through 1955. He finished his 14-year minor league playing career in 1955 with a cumulative .343 batting average, almost all of it in the bush leagues of West Texas and eastern New Mexico.

39. Post-football, Brookshier had a long career as a NFL broadcaster.

40. A similar incident occurred just a week before, on May 10 when seven members of the Decatur Commodores of the Mississippi-Ohio Valley League narrowly escaped death from carbon monoxide poisoning on t he team bus. Johnson and Wolff, 434.

41. Johnson and Wolff, 441.

42. Pietrusza, 109.

43. The New Mexico franchises were the Hobbs Sports, the Carlsbad Potashers, the Roswell Rockets, and the Clovis Pioneers.

44. White, 4-5.

45. Johnson and Wolff, 447.

46. White, 166.

47. Johnson and Wolff, 411.

48. Gene Kirby with Bo Carter and Mark S. McDonald, Dizzy Dean of Baseball and My Podnah (San Antonio: Cool Cat Publications, 2016).

49. Peter G. Pierce, Baseball in the Cross Timbers: The Story of the Sooner State League (Oklahoma Heritage Association Publishing, 2009); Peter G. Pierce, Red Dirt Baseball: The Post-War Years, Small Team Professional Baseball in Oklahoma 1946-1961 (Oklahoma Heritage Association Publishing, 2015).

50. DJ Stout, The Amazing Tale of Mr. Herbert and His Fabulous Alpine Cowboys Baseball Club (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010): 215.

51. Stout, 225.

52. James Forr, “Willie Stargell,” SABR BioProject at https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/willie-stargell/.

53. Smith, 117-21. Forr.

54. Smith, 25-36.

55. White, xx.

56. Smith, 35-36.

57. The Texas League would carry on, but as one of the premier minor leagues; it could hardly be considered a “bush” league.