The Broadview Buffaloes

The Broadview Buffaloes in front of the Broadview, Saskatchewan, CPR Station, 1937. Back row: Buck Eaton, John Isaacson, Chris Edwards, Dick Webb, Gene Bremer, Mack Sinclair. Front row: Lionel Decuir, Red Boguille, Roy Schappert, Kitchie Bates, Ronnie Bates (manager). (Thora Anderson, Broadview)

 

Broadview is a Saskatchewan town of fewer than 1,000 people, 90 miles east of Regina on the southern Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) line. It’s a seemingly unlikely place to have hosted a powerhouse fully-integrated baseball team during the 1930s, but host such a team it did: the Broadview Buffaloes.

My father, Jack Wyatt, was born in Broadview, as was I. One of my father’s acquaintances, a local resident named Chris Edwards, had played third base for the Buffaloes.1 I was able to interview Edwards, along with a friend of his named Bus Conn,2 who had been a teammate of his on the Buffaloes. Edwards was able to put me in touch with an elderly Regina woman named Edie Maynard,3 who, along with her husband, Frank, had operated a Broadview hotel on the CPR line, and had helped to bankroll the team during the 1930s.

Mrs. Maynard had acted as the team’s treasurer, and still possessed the books from her ownership tenure. One interesting expense item therein was a $1,000 bond that the team had to pay at the international border each year to allow the Black players entry into Canada; the payment was then refundable upon the return of the same players at season’s end.

What was unusual about this arrangement was the number of players being imported en masse to represent a single team. Prior to 1930, there had been many documented cases of imported African American ringers coming to Canada from the US to play, but these were individuals for the most part. Usually, they were pitchers only, as in the case of the legendary lefty John Donaldson, who had thrown for semipro teams in the Saskatchewan centers of Moose Jaw and Radville in 1925.4 A single Black pitcher helping an otherwise White team was a common arrangement.

The Buffaloes were a semipro squad. It was typically the Black imports who were paid, while most of the local amateurs (who were still good ballplayers in their own right) were not. The Western Canada baseball landscape was a competitive one in that era. Every town and city wanted to win, and side bets were very common. Senior baseball in Broadview dates from 1934 and 1935, when the town fielded an all-White team called the Red Sox. Independent of any league, they played the lucrative tournament circuit (or as lucrative as prairie baseball during the Great Depression could be).

By 1936, still as independents, they took aboard a 21-year-old right-handed pitcher, Gene Bremer,5 and his catcher, Lionel Decuir. The two Negro League players, and their Shreveport Acme Giants teammates, had visited Winnipeg in 1935 for an exhibition series against future Hall of Fame pitching great Satchel Paige and his Bismarck Corwin-Churchills, an integrated team from across the border in Bismarck, North Dakota. (The Bismarck team captured the inaugural National Baseball Congress semipro title later that year.)6

Between 1936 and 1938, the Broadview roster featured Bremer, Decuir (who later moved to the Kansas City Monarchs), and others from the Negro Leagues, including pitchers Jimmy Miller and George Alexander, power-hitting Sonny Harris, and the versatile Red Boguille. (According to Edie Maynard’s records, Bremer was paid $45 a month plus housing expenses his first year in Broadview.) The team’s White locals, in addition to Edwards and Conn, included Roy Schappert, Kitchie Bates, Harold Horeak, Mack Sinclair, and Dick Webb. All were decent ballplayers, and well-known in the area.

The Red Sox won three major tournaments in 1936 with their beefed-up lineup. On June 11 they took the Broadview Annual Sports Day Tournament, beating the Moose Jaw Athletics, 5-0.7 On July 1 they won the Moosomin Dominion Day Tournament by defeating Virden, Manitoba, 9-3. (In the semifinal, the Red Sox had defeated Regina Nationals ace Myron Appell, a fireballer who was one of the province’s top pitchers.8 A month earlier, Appell, from Nebraska, had dominated the visiting Houston Black Buffaloes, striking out 14 in seven innings. The loss was the touring Black Buffaloes’ first in 27 games. They fared no better against Appell later in the month, victims of a no-hitter.)9 And on July 22, Broadview took the four-team Yorkton tournament, beating the host team 8-4 behind Jimmy Miller, after Bremer had pitched Broadview to an 8-2 victory over the Northgate (North Dakota) Yankees in the earlier game.10

Finally, on July 31, the Red Sox, with Miller again on the mound, made a real name for themselves by downing the famous House of David, the bearded White barnstormers from Benton Harbor, Michigan, in an exhibition game at Indian Head by a score of 8-5.11

In 1937 the Red Sox changed their name to the Buffaloes and joined the elite Saskatchewan Southern League, with the Weyburn Beavers, Notre Dame Hounds, and Moose Jaw Athletics as competition. Weyburn’s catcher was 19-year-old Elmer Lach, the future hockey Hall of Famer, and the Moose Jaw team featured brothers Doug and Reg Bentley, also of National Hockey League fame.12

The Notre Dame team was a group of students from the religious and educational institution located in Wilcox, Saskatchewan, some 30 miles south of Regina.13 The league’s deliberately light schedule allowed plenty of time for exhibition and tournament play.

The Broadview crew, preseason favorites based on their high-powered attack, did not disappoint, winning the pennant easily with an 8-1 record, their only loss early in the season to the young students of Notre Dame. As well, they captured four tournament titles, in Grenfell, La Fleche, Lemberg, and Regina,14 the last featuring a 17-1 whipping of the local Regina Pilsners.

In this prestigious Regina Exhibition Tournament, a six-day affair, shortstop Horeak and catcher Decuir led the Broadview attack, while Winnipeg natives Buck Eaton and John Isaacson handled the bulk of the pitching duties.15 In another tournament nine days earlier, Broadview had split the prize money with the Northgate Yankees after the two teams had battled to a 7-7 tie in Broadview in a game called because of darkness.

The league opted to skip in-house playoffs after the season, electing instead to compete in the provincials with the northern teams. Broadview, however, was denied any postseason competition when an allegation was made that one of its players had played professionally the year before. This was ironic, in light of the fact that there were professional ringers all over the prairies in any given year. Investigation into a further allegation revealed that the Buffaloes had also been playing against touring American teams without the proper SABA (Saskatchewan Amateur Baseball Association) permits.16

The Saskatchewan Southern League opened its 1938 season with only a single change of membership from the previous season, the Regina Senators replacing the Moose Jaw franchise, which did not reapply for entry. The Senators joined the Weyburn Beavers and Notre Dame Hounds in attempting to dethrone the defending champion and preseason favorite Buffaloes. Hard-hitting Broadview infielder Harold Horeak had moved to the Regina team, while Weyburn still featured 20-year-old Elmer Lach, then primarily an outfielder.17

The schedule had been expanded somewhat from 1937’s deliberately short one, but still featured gaps to accommodate the popular tournament play. When league play finished on July 31, the Buffaloes had won another pennant, finishing 16-5, their closest pursuers the Regina Senators at 9-9.18

By this time, the team was making a name outside Saskatchewan. A July 13, 1938, Winnipeg Free Press article reported, “A baseball classic of note is scheduled for Moosomin ball park … when the cream of western senior ball teams meet in the $300 tournament…. Broadview Buffaloes, with colored players from the Southern States, are a mighty machine that is tops in the Saskatchewan Senior League right now.”19 The Buffaloes didn’t win that tournament, finishing third, but they did win a number of other tournaments and important exhibition games.

In the annual Grenfell Tournament in May, the Buffaloes won a semifinal marathon in 14 innings behind eight shutout innings of relief from hurler Ramie (first name unknown). Lionel Decuir’s home run in the seventh inning tied the game, and his second won it in the 14th. The team missed out on the tourney’s top money, however, falling in the final to the Dunseith (North Dakota) Acme Giants before a crowd of more than 4,000. They rebounded days later with a 2-1 exhibition victory over the strong Northgate Yankees, first baseman Sonny Harris’s final-inning round-tripper providing the winning margin.20

A season’s highlight was another victory in the annual Broadview Sports Day Tournament on June 16, as they thumped the Northgate Yankees 12-4 in the final behind Red Boguille’s eight-hitter. Second baseman Sonny Harris had a double and a triple and scored three runs, while third baseman Don Sherran chipped in a triple and two singles. Broadview had blanked Liberty, 5-0, in the semifinal behind George Alexander’s four-hitter. Eight days later, they won a 16-team tournament in Watson, Saskatchewan, by defeating the hometown team 2-0.

They next claimed first-place money at the Dominion Day tournament in nearby Norquay. That summer, the Buffaloes beat the powerful Grover Cleveland Alexander House of David team twice, as well as the minor-league San Antonio Missions, also twice, and the colored House of David squad.21

The Buffaloes’ superiority over the rest of the league’s teams, however, proved to be the Southern League’s undoing. Before the July 31 end of the regular season, fans had become accustomed to seeing them win, and attendance was falling accordingly. By late July, teams stopped playing their scheduled games, failing to meet their commitments to the league.

The lost gate revenue had its expected effect on each team’s finances. An assessment of the league’s 1938 season suggests that while the league’s caliber of play was high, in fact as high as that of any other league in the province, the member teams seemed more interested in their individual agendas than in a commitment to the overall welfare of the circuit.22

With the bitter taste of the previous year’s postseason still lingering, and expecting similar treatment at the hands of the SABA authorities, Broadview decided to bow out of the 1938 playoff picture and continue on the tournament and exhibition trail into August, before calling it a season. After three impressive years, two of those in the Southern League, the Broadview Buffaloes disbanded. Their run was over.

Several of the White players left to join other prairie teams. Most of the Blacks returned to the Negro Leagues. Lionel Decuir caught for the Kansas City Monarchs23 in 1939 and ’40, where he had Satchel Paige for a teammate. In 1942 Sonny Harris found his way to the Cincinnati Buckeyes, who moved in midseason to Cleveland. His teammate there, Gene Bremer, was the most successful of the Buffaloes imports. Born in 1915 in New Orleans, Bremer was not a big man at 5-feet-8 and 160 pounds,24 but he could throw hard, using no windup and featuring a fastball that may have hit the low 90s. He was an excellent hitter as well: According to Baseball-Reference, his career OPS+ of 112 is the highest of any post-1900 pitcher (for at least 75% of their game appearances) with at least 100 plate appearances.

But tragedy struck Bremer, when he suffered a fractured skull in a car accident in late 1942 that killed two of his Cleveland Buckeyes teammates.25 Taking a year off from baseball in 1943 to recover, Bremer came back and still pitched well. He was a four-time Negro League All-Star,26 appearing in the years 1940, 1942, 1944, and 1945 in the East-West All-Star Game, the Black equivalent to the White major leagues’ All-Star Game. These games were held in Chicago, before crowds as large as 50,000.

Bremer was talented enough to play with and against such megastars in these games as Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Josh Gibson, Roy Campanella, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell, Sam Jethroe, Ray Dandridge, and Double Duty Radcliffe. With the Buffaloes, he had already been part of what may have been the first fully-integrated team in Canada in the mid-1930s; he seemed poised to repeat his feat nearly a decade later, when a war-time rumor had Bremer and two teammates, third baseman Parnell Woods and outfielder Sam Jethroe, about to receive tryouts with the American League’s Cleveland Indians. But the traffic accident then killed the tryouts, in addition to his two teammates.27 Had Bremer been signed by the Indians, he might have been a two-time trailblazer, once on each side of the border. Bremer retired as a Buckeye in 1948, and died in 1971 at the age of 54, still a Cleveland resident.28

The Broadview Buffaloes had a short but successful existence, dominating their competition in the southern prairies between 1936 and 1938. Their legacy is that they were one of the first fully integrated baseball teams in Canada, if not the first. The composition of their roster was not only rare for its time, but a harbinger of things to come in its similarity to the makeup of major-league rosters of 25 to 30 years later.

DANIEL WYATT is Canadian, born and raised on the prairies of Saskatchewan. Currently residing outside Toronto, he is the author of 12 books in the historical and historical fiction genres. He’s had articles published in various magazines, including The Hockey News and Baseball Digest, and has been a steady article contributor to TheNationalPastimeMuseum.com online baseball history website.

ANDREW NORTH is a retired developer of statistical software. He is a director of the Centre for Canadian Baseball Research and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal for Canadian Baseball. A SABR member since 1982, he lives in St. Marys, Ontario, where he maintains the research library at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

 

Sources and acknowledgments

My father, Jack Wyatt, and local Broadview residents Chris Edwards, Edie Maynard, Bus Conn, and others were very accommodating to interview requests. A useful biographical reference was Barry Swanton and Jay-Dell Mah’s book Black Baseball Players in Canada. And of immeasurable help was Mah’s outstanding website www.attheplate.com, dedicated primarily to baseball in the Western provinces. Many of his accounts are from local newspaper archives. The site is a treasure trove of information and is recommended unreservedly.

 

Notes

1 Daniel Wyatt interview with Jack Wyatt, Regina, Saskatchewan, September 1975.

2 Daniel Wyatt interview with Chris Edwards and Bus Conn, Broadview, Saskatchewan, September 1975.

3 Daniel Wyatt interview with Edie Maynard, Regina, Saskatchewan, September 1975.

4 Barry Swanton and Jay-Dell Mah, Black Baseball Players in Canada (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009), 59.

5 Different sources suggest different spell ings of Bremer’s surname. The Seamheads Negro Leagues data base uses Bremer. Swanton and Mah use Bremmer.

6 Swanton and Mah, 32.

7 Jay-Dell Mah, “Western Canada Baseball” website: http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1936_1k.html.

8 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1936_1k.html.

9 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1936_50i.html.

10 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1936_1k.html.

11 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1936_50i.html.

12 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1937_1j.html.

13 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1937_50i.html.

14 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1937_1k.html.

15 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1937_1k.html.

16 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1937_50i.html.

17 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1938_1j.html.

18 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1938_1.html.

19 Winnipeg Free Press, July 13, 1938: 15. Accessed July 9, 2021 via https://archives.winnipegfreepress.com/winnipeg-free-press/1938-07-13/page-15/.

20 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1938v1k.html.

21 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1938_1k.html.

22 Jay-Dell Mah, http://www.attheplate.com/wcbl/1938_50i.html.

23 Swanton and Mah, 58.

24 Swanton and Mah, 32.

25 Swanton and Mah, 32.

26 Swanton and Mah, 32.

27 Swanton and Mah, 32.

28 Swanton and Mah, 32.