The Biggest Little Town in Organized Ball: Majors Stadium Welcomed Big Crowds for Minor League Baseball

An industrial lot on the eastern edge of downtown Greenville, Texas, covered with heavy equipment, gives no sign of its grand history, except for one feature: a brick and concrete arch still stands with the welded metal inscription “Majors Stadium,” coated with a layer of primer paint, across the top. It takes an excellent imagination to visualize Joe DiMaggio ranging across the lot, as he did one day in 1949.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the site was the home of the Class C and Class B Greenville Majors. The Majors’ story epitomizes the boom and bust of small-town, independent minor league baseball in the postwar years.

At Majors Stadium, originally known as Phillips Field, crowds representing up to one-seventh of the city’s population routinely passed through the elegant archway on summer nights, sharing a communal experience that would quickly disappear with the advent of television and air conditioning. Such was the city’s enthusiasm for the Majors that it once attracted attention from The Sporting News. Community pride in the Majors led city leaders to build what was then considered a state-of-the-art minor-league facility. But with remarkable swiftness interest in the team faded. Now few citizens in the town of 25,000 know the rich history of the Greenville Majors and Majors Stadium.

MINOR LEAGUE BOOM

In the euphoric atmosphere immediately following the end of World War II, the number of minor leagues jumped from 12 in 1945, to 41 in 1946, to 59 in 1949.1 Attendance boomed from 10 million in 1945, to 32 million in 1946, and more than 40 million in 1949. The Sporting News noted that the record-setting attendance reached down to the lower minors. The Class D Evangeline League drew 575,000 in 1946, and the Class B Western International League drew 780,443.2 But just as quickly, the bush-league boom faded:

Television boomed, but it was not baseball on TV that was keeping the fans at home. For an evening’s entertainment a family could watch “Milton Berle,” “I Love Lucy,” and have the novelty of a dozen other shows. Earlier, people were looking for a way out of hot, stuffy houses; now, with air conditioning being perfected there was no need to leave home. 3

The rise and fall of the Greenville Majors mirrored the national minor league boom and bust. But the Majors’ rise was more metoric and their fall more abrupt than that of other small-town teams.

Ironically, in the era of the Internet and satellite television, minor league baseball has staged an incredible comeback. Obviously, many people are now looking for reasons to get out of the house. In 2001, the minors drew 38.8 million fans, the second highest total in history, and the most since 1949, when seemingly every small town had a team. In 2002, another 38.6 million paid their way into minor league parks.4

Even in major league markets such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City, and, yes, New York, fans are attracted to minor league baseball—even more improbably to independent minor league games—by outrageous promotions, low ticket prices, seats close to the field, and the family-oriented atmosphere.

Some cities and ballparks somehow defied history. Minor leaguers have played ball at Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, since around 1892. But, more typically, the revival of minor league ball has represented a rebirth. Since 1995, 78 new minor league ballparks have been built.5 What baseball fans of the early 1950s abandoned as obsolete, their grandchildren have reclaimed, too late for the Greenville Majors and many other teams like them.

Class D minor league teams had played in Greenville in 1905-07, 1912, and from 1921 to 1926. The teams had been known by various names, including Hunters, Highlanders, Togs, and Staplers, and played in various leagues, including the North Texas, Texas-Oklahoma and East Texas Leagues.6 

Origins of Phillips Field

The 1906 Greenville Hunters played in the Texas League, then Class D, with big-city teams in Dallas and Fort Worth. Joseph W. Gardner, the owner of the Dallas franchise, put up the money to place the team in Greenville. Low attendance caused the league to drop the Greenville and Temple franchises for the second half of the season. Don Curtis, who later became a St. Louis Cardinal scout and signed Dizzy Dean, managed the Hunters. 7

These early teams played at the “Younger lot” on East Lee Street; Haynes Park, northeast of Majors Stadium, “clear across the railroad”; Morrow Park on the city’s far northwest side; Pickens Park (which burned) and later Urquhart Park on “Puddin’ Hill” on the far southeast side of the city; and the old Hunt County Fair Grounds on East Stanford Street. 8

By the end of the booming 1920s, the citizens of Greenville decided that the city needed an athletic facility that compared favorably with rival cities. In 1929, Mrs. F. J. (Eula Lasater) Phillips made a $3,500 donation to the Greenville Athletic Council to buy the property. It was named for her and her late husband, Frank, a local bank president. Unlike today’s tax-supported projects, funding for the new stadium came entirely from citizen contributions. At the meeting in which Mrs. Phillips’ donation was announced, “enthusiasm ran riot,” and immediately Athletic Council members pledged $1,400 for the project.9

The Greenville Baseball Club, a citizens group that was contemplating the acquisition of a new minor league team, donated $1,800 that remained from the liquidation of the previous minor league team three years before to the Greenville Athletic Association. Individual citizens donated the remainder of the necessary funding.10

Although the facility was created to serve the immediate needs of the high school football team, planners conceived from the beginning that it might also serve a minor league professional baseball team at some point. “[The Building and Grounds] committee voted that the next step in the stadium program should be the erection of a baseball grandstand,” the Greenville Morning Herald reported.11 The newspaper did not report how the field would accommodate both football and baseball, with separate grandstands.

Phillips Field, with an original seating capacity of 2,960, hosted its first event on October 4, 1929, when the Greenville High School Lions hosted Dallas’ Oak Cliff High School Leopards in a football game.12 On December 31, the Greenville Athletic Association turned Phillips Field over to the city of Greenville, but the property was to be managed by the Greenville Public Schools.13

Coach Henry Frnka led the Lions in the undefeated, state championship season of 1933. 14 At the time Texas high school football teams played for a single state championship; no classifications based on school enrollment existed. They defeated Dallas Tech 21-0 for the championship at the Cotton Bowl (then “Fair Park Stadium”) in Dallas.15

Frnka coached the Lions from 1931 to 1935, then left Greenville to begin college coaching, serving as an assistant coach at Vanderbilt and Temple Universities from 1936 to 1940. He later was named to the Texas High School Coaches Hall of Honor. 

Minor League Baseball Returns to Greenville

In the postwar boom of 1946, a minor league professional team finally took up residence at Phillips Field. The Greenville Baseball Club raised $22,000 in the sale of stock from local businesses and individuals to place a team in the Class C East Texas League.16 The team was named the “Majors” in honor of the first young man from Greenville killed in World War II, Truett Majors.17 “We had just emerged victoriously in World War II,” Joe Phillips, the grandson of Frank and Eula Phillips, baseball historian and collector, remembered. “We were proud of that and had local guys like Monty Stratton, who was still trying to pitch with one leg, and Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II. There was a lot to celebrate and feel good about.”

The club bought Phillips Field from the school district for $6,000. For the 1946 season, the long, straight wooden football grandstand on the west side of the property served as the ballpark’s primary seating. The visitors’ bleachers on the east side were razed to make way for the baseball outfield. “Home plate will be directly in front of the old 50-yard-line marker on the west side with the playing field to the east,” a Greenville Morning Herald article explained. The park’s symmetrical dimensions were about 320 feet down the left and right field lines and 400 feet to center.18 The outfield fence was “of metal construction and is there to stay, with no possibility of destruction by fire,” the newspaper reported.19 The 75-cent reserved seats were located between the 20-yard lines. The Greenville High School football team played the 1946 season at the park, and then moved to a new stadium across town, also named Phillips Field, which still stands.

In Greenville, a city infamous for the well-intentioned but thoughtless slogan “the blackest land, the whitest people” (“whitest” meaning “most honest” or “most decent”), segregation still ruled the day in 1946. The newspaper article describing the conversion of the football stadium into a baseball park explained that the lumber from the razed visitors’ bleachers was “being stacked for use in erecting a Negro bleachers at the north end of the playing field.”

Hungry for baseball and good times after four years of world war, Greenville fans attended Majors games in droves, despite a slow start that kept the team in the second division of the East Texas League until the latter part of the season. The regular-season attendance of 160,186 (reported by some sources as 167,000) has been reported as a Class C full-season attendance record.20

Unfortunately, the attendance record is doubtful. A record book of minor-league baseball shows that Greensboro, North Carolina, of the Class C Carolina League, reported attendance of 171,801 in 1946. 21 But the Greenville fans’ support of the Majors in 1946 is remarkable nonetheless. U.S. Census figures show Greensboro had a 1950 population of more than 74,000, and it surely would have been several times larger than Greenville in 1946. The Majors averaged 2,460 fans per game in 1946, meaning about 17% of the city’s 1946 population of 14,000 attended a game on any given night. By comparison, if 17% of New York City’s 1950 population of more than 7.8 million attended a single baseball game, the attendance would have been more than 1.3 million.

A TSN article on the Majors’ attendance referred to Greenville as “the biggest little town in Organized Ball.” The article noted that the Majors’ attendance was more than the total attendance for the entire East Texas League in the last two seasons before World War II, and that the attendance was greater than that of several Class AA Texas League teams, all playing in cities at least six times larger than Greenville. Thanks largely to Greenville, in 1946 the East Texas League led Class C baseball in attendance with 700,000.

The Majors made a strong impression on at least one veteran baseball fan. In a note to a friend, an unidentified writer remembered going to a Greenville Togs game in 1922. “They sure play a classier brand of ball here now than in 1922. This is big-time stuff now,” the writer enthused.22

Greenville fans showed a fierce passion for baseball in 1946-47. The Majors met the Henderson Oilers in a best-of-seven East Texas League playoff series in 1946. Rabid fans from both cities traveled with their teams, and tempers flared on both sides. In the first game, played at Phillips Field, an overflow crowd estimated at 5,000 turned out to see the Majors win, 5-3. The seventh game of the series had to be moved from Henderson to the neutral site of Texarkana after near-riot conditions in Henderson at the sixth game. League president J. Walter Morris ordered the change, calling the Henderson fans’ abuse of the Greenville players “a disgrace to organized baseball.” At least one Greenville player was attacked by a Henderson fan.23

But apparently the Greenville fans themselves had been less than perfect models of decorum. Prior to the sixth game, a reporter with the Henderson newspaper, anticipating that the Oilers would win and force a seventh game in Henderson, wrote: “The seventh and deciding game will be played at the Oiler stadium, in a city where fans have a sense of fair play and decency. There will be no more games this year in Greenville.”24 Two thousand Greenville fans traveled more than 120 miles to Texarkana for the deciding game, only to see their team lose to Henderson, 12-6.

“When the playoffs came against Henderson, there absolutely was a fever about the town,” Joe Phillips remembers. “Dad was afraid to take me to the home games because there had been fights at the games in Henderson. A person couldn’t buy a ticket for the playoffs. Prior to that I had taken my good friend to the games with us. I had already asked him to go with me to the game, but Dad couldn’t take him. I lost a friend after he came over to the house and we had to tell him that we didn’t have a ticket for him.”25

“My favorite players were power hitter Dean Stafford and Gibby Brack, who had played in the major leagues during the 1930s,” says Phillips. Brack played in 315 games for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies from 1937 to 1939, hitting .279 with 16 home runs. “Center fielder Eddie Palmer was the ‘Frank Sinatra’ of the team. A nice-looking guy, he was a fast runner with a head-back style. He would run out from under his cap regularly, to the delight of the fans and especially the girls.” Forty four-year-old Sal Gliatto, who spent the 1930 season with the Cleveland Indians, pitched for the Majors and managed the club early in the season. On June 1, first baseman Alex Hooks replaced Gliatto as manager.

The support for the local team seems quaint by today’s standards. Before the series with Henderson, the newspaper reported that a group of 30 businessmen had pledged to reward the players. “Each Major player will get $5 for each hit he gets during the series. He will also get $5 for a sacrifice hit or an outfield fly that advances a base runner,” the paper reported. Pitchers would share $25 for a win. A pitcher going the full game would keep the whole $25 for himself. 26

”After supper, we would sit back on the porch and talk,” Majors fan Marie Heidmann told the Greenville Herald Banner many years later. ”A little after seven p.m., we would hear the sounds from Phillips Field. It would start with ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame.’ So up we went to the ball game. That really was a wonderful, wonderful time. People didn’t have to pay a lot to see a baseball game. [In 1946, Majors general-admission ticket prices were 25 cents for children and 50 cents for adults with reserved seats going for 75 cents. Season tickets were $4.] It was family entertainment. Those were the nicest boys and they could play, too.” Mrs. Heidmann remembered once deciding to stay home and listen to the game on the radio, but the announcer’s excited description of a Gibby Brack homer proved too much to stand; the family headed to the ballpark.27

Majors Stadium Replaces Phillips Field

For the 1947 season, the Greenville Baseball Club demolished the old wooden football stands. Baseball stands, built of steel and concrete in a semicircle from third base to first base and seating about 3,600, were constructed. The Greenville Baseball Club sold stock to raise the money to build the concrete and steel grandstand, which was modeled after Burnett Park in Texarkana.

The new park, christened Majors Stadium, was considered one of the most modern in this part of the country. “I recall that the stands were painted in forest green,” Phillips said. “There were [open] concrete areas where folding chairs were set up for reserved box seats, close to the field. There were two entrances to the seats behind home plate and entrances and ramps on the first- and third-base sides. A roof protected those in the upper part of the stands from the rain. The press box seemed large and adequate to accommodate radio and print news with a fine view behind and above home plate.

“It never dawned on me that we had a state-of-the-art baseball park until later when I visited and/or played in the ballparks in places like Paris, Gainesville, Sulphur Springs, Sherman, Denison, Tyler, and Marshall. I was told by one source much later that Greenville and the park in Kilgore were the prettiest and nicest minor league parks in East Texas.”

Joe Phillips recalls the fun of hanging around the ballpark as a boy. A favorite pastime was collecting used soda bottles. “Those were the days when there were no paper cups and the bottles could be returned for refilling to the plant,” he remembered. “I think we got one or two cents a return and it seemed like a lot of fun. Of course, trying to get foul balls before the ‘official ball chaser’ – Hilly Brown – was challenging, and always rewarding if you could get a ball.”

With a brand-new ballpark in place, the Majors rose to the Class B Big State League for the 1947 season. Although finishing the regular season in second place, one game behind Texarkana, the team won 100 games. Greenville again led the league in attendance, but, ominously, with an excellent team and a new park, attendance fell to 154,356. Still, the Majors far outdrew the Austin franchise of the Big State League.

An overflow crowd of 4,101 turned out for the Majors’ 8-3 win over the Wichita Falls Spudders. The big attraction was the wedding of Stafford and Frances Erwin. The couple walked beneath an arc of bats held aloft by an “honor guard” of players from both teams. The Majors lost a playoff series to Wichita Falls, four games to two. 

DiMaggio, Yankees Grace Majors Stadium

As suddenly as the passion for the Majors began, it cooled. In 1948, the Majors fell to last place in the Big State League, and attendance accordingly fell by more than half, to 67,334. The Majors, who led their league in attendance by a wide margin in each of their first two years, attracting national attention, suddenly found themselves dead last in paid admissions.

“Greenville had a very bad baseball team in 1948,” Phillips explained. “Earlier stars had departed and there was dissension among the fans and loyal team backers. Greenville was not going to support a loser.”

But on a chilly Sunday afternoon, April 10, 1949, the little ball yard enjoyed its greatest glory, playing host to big-league royalty, the New York Yankees. Casey Stengel, in his first season, managed the team, and the immortal Joe DiMaggio roamed center field. 28 Hall of Fame broadcaster Mel Allen described the game for radio listeners in New York. But the Majors were not content to simply set foot on the same field as the perennial world champions: The minor leaguers actually beat the Yanks that day, 4-3.

In those days it was common for major league teams to barnstorm their way through the south in the last days of spring training, prior to moving north for the start of the regular season. Following the disappointing 1948 season, the Greenville Baseball Club entered into a lease agreement for the Majors and the ballpark with George Schepps of Dallas, the longtime owner of the Dallas Texas League team and several other clubs. Schepps had enough influence to bring the Yankees to Greenville.

Tellingly, the game did not draw a capacity crowd to Majors Stadium. A crowd of 2,951 attended the game, considerably less than the stadium’s capacity of about 3,600. A heavy rain the night before had soaked the field, and rained out a scheduled game against a Chicago Cubs B squad. Apparently some believed the Yankee game had also been rained out. A New York Times account of the game said: “Rains and unseasonable cold resulted in a disappointing crowd.” The weather report in the Dallas Morning News the following day said the day’s high temperature in Dallas, 50 miles west, had been 59 degrees.

Despite the weather, the Majors earned their victory. DiMaggio started in center field, and had a single and scored a run in two at bats. Ace pitcher Allie Reynolds started on the mound for the Yankees, and pitched five innings, giving up three runs on five hits. Other well-known Yankees, such as second baseman George Stirnweiss, shortstop Jerry Coleman, third baseman Bobby Brown (who went on to become president of the American League), and right fielder Gene Woodling played in the game. But the Yanks, perhaps wary of playing on a soggy field, committed four errors. Still, they apparently gave it their best. “The Yankees took a full session of batting practice… and a regular infield workout despite the wet grounds and in every way possible put on a show for the fans that was well-appreciated,” a local sports-writer wrote. 

The game produced a mystery that remains unresolved. Playing center field that day for the Majors was Pepper Martin. Whether this was the former St. Louis Cardinals “Gashouse Gang” third baseman and outfielder John Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin, nicknamed the “Wild Horse of the Osage” for his exuberant, reckless play, is questionable. Martin scored the winning for the Majors in the bottom of the seventh inning, and had one hit and two RBI.

Pepper Martin had played for the old Greenville Hunters minor league team in 1924 and 1925 before going on to a legendary career with the Cardinals from 1928 to 1944. He would have been 45 years old in April 1949, but in those days, many major-league players continued to play in the minors long after their glory days had ended. 29

Contemporary accounts of the game suggest that it was not the Pepper Martin who played for the Majors that day. The Greenville newspaper accounts make no special reference to Martin. The very brief Dallas Morning News account of the game makes no reference at all to Martin, but the story on an exhibition game between the Majors and the Texas League Dallas Eagles in Greenville on Friday night, April 8, 1949, refers to a “Charlie ‘Pepper’ Martin,” rather than John “Pepper” Martin. The New York Times story on the Yankees-Majors game refers to “Pepper Martin (not of the Osage).” Records show that Martin, whoever he truly was, did not remain with the Majors during the regular season. John “Pepper” Martin managed the Miami International League team in 1949.

However, some believe that the Martin who played for the Majors that day indeed was the longtime major leaguer. “The chances of another Pepper Martin playing for Greenville are slim to none, but neither the (Baseball) Hall of Fame nor (Texas A&M University-Commerce historian Dr. James) Conrad could guarantee the same Martin scored the winning run against the Yankees,” a newspaper article said. 30

Joe Phillips attended the game as a boy, and until recently held a baseball that was autographed by several of the Yankees and Majors, including Peter Martin. Phillips, a baseball collector, sold the ball recently and is confident the Martin autograph was genuine. “I’ve got to think that was our daring John ‘Pepper’ Martin. He signed on the sweet spot of our baseball and the signature looks like his,” Phillips wrote. Phillips believes George Schepps probably brought Martin in to bolster the Majors’ lineup just for the exhibition game with the Yankees. Indeed, the New York Times article indicates the Majors brought in some reinforcements for the game.

One other player in the Majors lineup that day played in the major leagues. Second baseman Elmer “Red” Durrett played in parts of two seasons, 1944 and 1945, for the Brooklyn Dodgers, hitting just .146.

The game foreshadowed the end of DiMaggio’s career. The Yankee Clipper reinjured a heel that had been operated on the year before. The nagging heel injury finally caused DiMaggio to retire after the 1951 season.

The Swift Decline

The 1949 Majors improved only slightly, placing sixth in the eight-team league, and attendance fell even further, to 58,500. The lease agreement with George Schepps apparently was not profitable for either party. At a board meeting of the Greenville Baseball Club on August 25, 1949, the directors passed a motion “not to be lenient any longer with G. Schepps and that the money that he now owes is now due,” although apparently the lease continued in effect. Apparently to keep the team afloat, the club later voted to borrow “a maximum of $7,500” prior to the 1950 season.

Majors Stadium enjoyed another day in the sun when the legendary Monty Stratton, a Greenville-area native and former Chicago White Sox star, pitched a game for the home team. A popular 1949 movie starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson, The Stratton Story, celebrated Stratton’s comeback from losing a leg in a hunting accident. On June 17, 1950, Stratton, using an artificial leg, pitched for the Majors in a game against Austin at Majors Stadium. Expected to pitch only a few innings, Stratton went the distance, giving up 11 hits, striking out five, and walking one in an 11-6 Greenville victory in front of a crowd of 2,951.

In 1950, still operating under the lease agreement with Schepps, the Majors regained their winning form, finishing 75-71, but it did not stop the attendance decline. As part of what was by now a general dip in minor league attendance, only 50,511 fans made their way to Majors Stadium, fewer than 700 per game. A crowd of 801 saw the team sweep a doubleheader from the Sherman-Denison Twins, 11-8 and 6-1, on Labor Day. It would be the final bow for the original Majors.

The team folded prior to the 1951 season. George Schepps and his partners paid the Greenville Baseball Club a settlement of $2,500, terminating the lease. The club turned down an offer to stage stock-car races at Majors Stadium, and instead allowed the park to be used for various amateur baseball leagues including the Hunt County League and the Little League games.

“I firmly believe that air conditioning and television were major factors [in the attendance decline],” Joe Phillips said.

“Instead of going to the baseball games, my parents and my family were now watching television at home or visiting friends where we’d gather to see wrestling or the fights. Before air conditioning, the ballpark offered a great place to ‘cool’ off before television. At least you could be moderately cooler and be surrounded by friends.”

Phillips also believes a general darkening of the post-war horizon played a role in the Majors’ decline. “By the late 1940s, Russia had dropped its first A bomb and the Cold War was just beginning to mount up. The Korean War was starting, and the optimism of the immediate postwar era had now turned to worry over the nuclear threat and Communism.”

Marie Heidmann felt a personal loss in the original Majors’ demise. “We [friends] would all sit in the same area, just like you do at church,” she recalled wistfully. “It was the thing to do in Greenville. But little by little, attendance went down. It really was sad.”

The remarkably tenacious Greenville Baseball Club remained active and brought professional baseball back to the city. Greenville again fielded a Big State League team in 1953. The Greenville Baseball Club took over the Longview Cherokees franchise. 

The Last Gasp

Dick Burnett, the owner of the Dallas Texas League team, operated the team under a deal similar to the earlier one with George Schepps. A strong opening-night crowd of an estimated 2,500 saw the new Majors defeat Texarkana, 6-3, but the crowd for the second game nosedived to 331.

Despite a good start that had the Majors in first place, the Greenville fans did not respond to the new team. The Majors moved to Bryan midway through the season. The team drew only 30,051 for the season in the two cities combined, and after moving to Bryan slumped to a 70-77 record. The team retained the name of “Majors” for the remainder of the 1953 season, and then took the name “Indians” in 1954. It played at Travis Park, which is still in use as a baseball facility today.

Greenville’s last gasp in minor league baseball came in 1957. The Greenville Baseball Club took over the McAlester Rockets franchise of the Sooner State League. The Rockets had a long-standing player-development agreement with the New York Yankees, which continued in Greenville. Again, the new team received the name of “Majors.” An estimated crowd of 700 turned out for the Majors’ first home game, a 6-2 win over Paris, and newspaper accounts show most games drawing about the same size of crowd. The Majors drew only 23,066 fans, but that was third best in the eight-team league. The Sooner State League folded before the next season.

The final season of minor league ball at Majors Stadium brought black players to Majors Stadium for the first time, at least as members of minor league clubs. One of them turned out to be a future Hall of Famer, Ponca City’s Billy Williams, who went on to enjoy a great career with the Chicago Cubs.

Unlike today’s minor league teams, the Majors of the 1940s and 1950s rarely held splashy promotions to help fill the stands. The 1947 wedding of outfielder Dean Stafford and the 1950 appearance of Monty Stratton were the rare exceptions. The Greenville Baseball Club typically would run a full-page, or even a two-page, ad in the newspaper for the season opener, but no more advertising would appear after that. “I’ve tried to recall if the Majors held any ‘special event’ nights, like cow-milking contests, donkey baseball, and so on, but I can’t recall that they did,” Joe Phillips said. Even in 1953 and 1957, the Majors enjoyed good daily coverage in the local newspapers, but, with minor league ball fading across the country, the exposure did not generate enough support for the Majors to buck the trend.

Years later, sportswriter Bob Franklin put the demise of the Majors in perspective. Musing on overflow crowds for youth-league games in Greenville, Franklin theorized that, in addition to the emergence of television and air conditioning, changes brought about by the postwar baby boom also doomed small-town minor league ball: 

For a fleeting moment, it makes an ardent baseball fan like me want to bring back the professional game, the exhilarating past when the Greenville Majors rode high in the Big State League and the diamond sport was a paying proposition …. Could baseball make a successful return? Would people surrender the price of admission? The answers are no. Baseball in the minor leagues is dead …. There’s just too much competition for the entertainment dollar. Go-carts, trampolines, bowling, miniature golf, skating, movies that are better than ever, and what have you have dispersed the entertainment dollar.

Admiring the family togetherness engendered by “kids baseball,” Franklin concluded: “There was family togetherness back in the days of the Greenville Majors too, but boys bustling with energy would rather play than watch. And parents, overflowing with pride, would rather watch their own children play than the adroit professionals”31

In early 1958, the Greenville Baseball Club finally dissolved and sold Majors Stadium to the Majors’ original president, automobile dealer J.P. “Punk” McNatt. McNatt bought the ballpark for $15,000, allowing the club to pay off its debts and donate the remainder to local charities. McNatt leased the park, renamed “Punk McNatt Stadium,” to the Greenville YMCA for $1 per year. In 1961, McNatt sold the property to the YMCA, also for $1.32

For several more years Hunt County League semipro and youth-league teams played on the field. Joe Phillips believes he played in the final game at Majors Stadium, a semi-pro affair, sometime in the early ’60s. “Felan Monk hit the last ball out of the ballpark down there,” Phillips said. “I’m sure that was the last game.” Charles and Billie Pickens, owners of the Greenville Transformer Co., bought the Majors Stadium property in May 1964, and soon razed the stands. The company still occupies the site. A building that stands at the northwest corner of the property on the corner of Houston and Church streets is part of the locker rooms for the old stadium. The brick entry that remains—ghostlike—at the southwest corner of the stadium site was constructed as part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) improvement project in 1940.33

Mrs. Pickens told the Commerce Journal in 1986 that she maintains the arch “for old times’ sake.” Little League teams still come each year to have their team pictures made in front of it. Mrs. Pickens has rebuffed attempts to move it to a new, more prominent location.

The Greenville Majors—like other small-town minor league teams of the late ’40s and early ’50s—existed in a tiny niche of time, never to be seen again. It was the exuberant, optimistic period immediately following World War II, just before television cast its spell on the country, isolating neighbors in their homes. The children of the baby boom were still toddlers, and the grim specter of the Cold War had not fully emerged. It was all over almost as soon as it began, but for a brief time, the Majors created something very close to major league excitement in a small northeast Texas town. Life in Greenville and other one-time pro-baseball cities might improve in other ways, but it would never again be so colorful. As Joe Phillips recalls: “The ’46-47 team seemed to pull Greenville together tightly, a rallying place. I don’t think the city ever recovered that feeling.” 

DR. J.M. DEMPSEY is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of North Texas. He holds a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, where he announced Aggie baseball on radio for seven seasons.

 

Notes

1. Johnson, Lloyd and Miles Wolff (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, first edition (Durham, NC: Baseball America, Inc.), 1993.

2. “Tops in Attendance,” The Sporting News, November 6, 1946, p. 20.

3. Johnson and Wolff, pp. 219, 263.

4. “Minor league baseball draws third-highest attendance mark,” Associated Press, September 25, 2002.

5. Pochna, Peter. “Majoring in family fun; Minor league ballparks go above and beyond baseball,” Bergen County (NJ) Record, August 4, 2002, p. A-1.

6. “Galaxy of Baseball Stars Paraded on Greenville’s Diamonds,” Greenville Morning Herald, May 9, 1950, Section 16, p. 1; Johnson and Wolff; Phillips, Joe. “Professional Baseball in Greenville, 1900-2000,” unpublished manuscript, 2002.

7. O’Neal, Bill. The Texas League, 1888-1987: A Century of Baseball (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1987), p. 255-56.

8. “Greenville Fans Have Modern Baseball, Football Playing Fields,” Greenville Evening Banner, May 7, 1950, p. 4.

9. “Mrs. Frank Phillips Contributes $3,500 for Purchase Permanent Athletic Field,” Greenville Evening Banner, February 26, 1929, p. 1.

10. “Select Site for New Phillips Field,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 25, 1929, p. 1; “Executive Committee Selects Site for Phillips Field, Accepts Donation from Baseball Club,” Greenville Evening Banner, April 25, 1929, p.l.

11. Contracts to be Let for Phillips Field Stadium,” Greenville Morning Herald, July 4, 1929, p. 3.

12. Ibid.; “Phillips Field Be Dedicated With Game With Oak Cliff On Oct. 4,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 11, 1929, p. 3.

13. “City Accepts Phillips Field,” Greenville Morning Herald, January 1, 1930, p. l.

14. “Frnka, former Greenville coach, dead,” Greenville Herald Banner, December 20, 1980, p. 1; Dan Bus, “Only the Memories Remain,” Greenville Herald Banner, February 11, 1968, Walworth Harrison Public Library, Greenville, Texas.

15. “1933 Football Team Wins State Title to Thrill Fans,” Greenville Evening Banner (Centennial edition, sports section), May 7, 1950, p. 6.

16. “$22,000 In Hand Local Baseball Club Organized; J.P. McNatt is President,” Greenville Morning Herald, January 23, 1946, p. 1.

17. “Baseball Club Be Known As Greenville Majors,” Greenville Morning Herald, March 7, 1946, p. 1.

18. “Conversion Phillips Field Baseball Park Under Way,” Greenville Morning Herald, February 22, 1946, 5.

19. “Committees Are Named to Sponsor Opening Game Here,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 17, 1946, p. 8; “Baseball At the Old Phillips Field” (photo cutline). Greenville Evening Banner (Centennial edition, sports section), May 7, 1950, p. 4.

20. “160,186 Paid See Majors Play Here During Season,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 25, 1946, p. 3; “Baseball At the Old Phillips Field,” 4; “Galaxy of Baseball Stars,” Section 16, 1; Harrison, History of Greenville.

21. Johnson, Lloyd and Miles Wolff (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, second edition (Durham, NC: Baseball America, Inc., 1997).

22. Newspaper clipping. Collection of Erica McKenzie, Rowlett, Texas.

23. “President J. Walter Morris Says Final Game on Neutral Field Wednesday Night,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 17, 1946, p. 1.

24. Ibid.

25. Phillips, personal communication with author, January 3, 2003.

26. “Local Fans Make Cash Awards for Majors Series,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 10, 1946, p. 3.

27. Press, Brad. “One victory put Majors into ‘League of their Own,”‘ Greenville Herald Banner, July 10, 1992. Collection of Erica McKenzie, Rowlett, Texas; “Committees are Named to Sponsor Opening Game Here,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 17, 1946, p. 8; Heidmann, Marie. videotape of speech to Hunt County Museum, July 1992.

28. “Majors Win Surprising 4-3 Victory Over New York Yankees Here Sunday,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 12, 1949, Walworth Harrison Public Library, Greenville, Texas.

29. Herman Scott, “Blackland Footprints,” March 8, 1965, Greenville Herald Banner, p. 1; “Pepper Martin.” (August 3, 2002).

30. Press, Brad. “One victory.” 31. Franklin, Bob. “Poor Robert’s Almanac,” Greenville Herald Banner, August 2, 1960, 8.

32. “Punk McNatt Buys Majors Stadium-YMCA leases field,” Greenville Herald Banner, April 17, 1958, p. 3; Direct Index to Deeds, L-R, 1/1/54-1/1/65, Hunt County, Texas, Clerk’s office, “McN” section, 54.

33. “Donation made Phillips Field,” Greenville Morning Herald, March 17, 1940, p. 6.