THE GREAT DALLAS/FORT WORTH BASEBALL RIVATRY

It was a refreshing and gracious gesture after another bitter baseball season. The year was 1920. The Fort Worth
Cats had won the Texas League pennant again, and Amon Carter told George Schepps of the Dallas Steers (later to
become the Dallas Rebels) that the Dallas fans could have 100 complimentary tickets to the Dixie Series opener in
Little Rock. The day before the game, a specially chartered train pulled into the Dallas station where the Dallas
fans waited to board. Standing on the cowcatcher of the train, Carter smiled and waved while through the windows of
the train, Carter’s Cowtown cronies grinned at the Dallas crowd, which was gaping in stunned disbelief as the train
pulled right through the station on its way to Arkansas, never stopping.

It seems somewhat fitting now, many years later, that major league baseball is played in Arlington. The Texas
(not Dallas, not Fort Worth) Rangers seem to exist as a kind of compromise, almost a memorial tribute, to an era
when there was Dallas Baseball and there was Fort Worth Baseball. And whenever the twain met, there was sport at its
elemental best. It was an era when sport was baseball. Pro football was a distant and insignificant fracas
that had something to do with Bears and Lions. Hockey was something that Canadians did. Tennis lived in Australia.
And the NBA might as well have stood for the National Bakers Association.

But baseball. Ah. glorious baseball. And the beauty of baseball in its golden years, before mass media cast the
disparaging coast-to-coast shadows of comparative quality, is that for the fans in the stands, there was nothing
less important about the Dallas Rebels versus the Fort Worth Cats than the Dodgers versus the Giants. Dallas versus
Fort Worth, a “natural rivalry” of cities belligerently juxtaposed by geography that has never found itself so
energetically expressed as it did in those days on the baseball diamond.

The Dallas-Fort Worth baseball feud actually began back in 1888 when each city became a charter member of the Texas
Professional Baseball League. Since that time, many of the greats of the game have dotted Texas League rosters,
including Hall of Famers Tris Speaker, Carl Hubbell, Dizzy Dean, Al Simmons, Bill Terry, Zach Wheat, Joe Medwick,
and Hank Greenberg. The league went through many phases what with teams shifting from town to town, from mascot to
mascot, with new owners buying in and selling out, and with players bouncing up and down between the majors and the
minors. But whenever Dallas and Fort Worth got together, there were always fireworks.

“It was one hell of a rivalry,” recalls George Schepps, who at one time or another filled every position on the
Dallas ball club from bat boy to owner. “In the Twenties and Thirties, we never got through a game without a fight.
The Fort Worth police didn’t like us any better than the rest of the town did and one day before a game they
arrested a bunch of our ballplayers. I got to counting before the game and realized we only had eight players who
weren’t in jail. I had to beg the cops to let Snipe Conley out of the clinker so we could play the game.”

The action was rarely limited to the playing field. “One time,” remembers Schepps, “Ziggy Sears – he was a Fort
Worth outfielder then and later a big league umpire – one time Ziggy just walked over to the stands and spit tobacco
juice right in the face of one of our fine Dallas box seat fans. And Amon Carter, when he came over to Dallas for a
game, he’d bring a box lunch. He wouldn’t even eat our concessions.” With the onset of World War II, the first era
of Texas League play was forced to an end – during the war there was a three year moratorium on Texas League play.
“We didn’t have any choice,” says Schepps. “We finished the ’42 season with six old men and a bunch of high school
kids. Everybody else had been drafted. And people weren’t spending money anymore either. We played one game before
84 spectators.”

But in the period after World War II, as in most areas of American life, there began a separate and distinct era in
Texas League history. And immediately the spat between Dallas and Fort Worth was revived, the beginning of a decade
when the baseball feud saw its Finest and most furious hours.

By 1946, Dallas and Fort Worth were aching to get at one another again and they weren’t to be denied. The Dallas
Rebels made their home in a half-finished stadium in the bottoms of the Trinity River, near Jefferson Boulevard in
Oak Cliff. The steel beams and rafters were in place, but there was no roof because of a lingering shortage of
materials from the demands of the war effort. When a pop foul went into the stands, it was like sitting inside a
pinball machine, the ball tantalizing as it bounced and careened from rafter to rafter, always seemingly just out of
reach. The P. A. announcer would ask fans to throw the ball back in and the bat boy would glare into the stands at
the suspected ball hawk who would pocket the ball and glare at the row behind him.

There was only one way to go to Rebel Stadium – at least only one fun way. By street car. The street car drivers led
frustrating lives. They couldn’t bull their way in and out of the choicest lanes like buses. Rooted to their rails,
they couldn’t even maneuver the necessary inches to ooch around the ten-mile-per-hour turnip green farmers. But once
each run, the driver of the Second Avenue to Jefferson car could let her out and barrel across the Oak Cliff viaduct
at a blazing 35 miles per hour. But not when the Fort Worth Cats came to town. Thirty minutes before a Fort Worth
game, the street cars would be backed up halfway across the viaduct, clogged by all the additional fans arriving in
their autos. Worse, the space allotted for stadium parking was little larger than the parking lot at Keller’s
Drive-In.

“In ’46, says George Schepps, “we played the Cats one exhibition game here and one there, then eleven regular
season games in Dallas and eleven in Fort Worth. All 24 games were sellouts. It was nothing for 3,500 Dallas fans to
show up at LaGrave Field.”

LaGrave Field was where the Cats had set up shop. “One of the best ball diamonds in the minors,” recalls Red Borom,
who shortstopped for the Rebels and later the Cats. “They had a grounds-keeper who was a regular artist.” Rebel
Stadium, on the other hand, had a strange outward slope in left field and a right field fence so far from home plate
that Jeff Burroughs would not have whimpered but cried.

Still, the Cats had by far the best team in ’46 and won the pennant by 10 games over the second place Rebels. The
Fort Worth pitching staff that year accomplished one of the most amazing feats in baseball history. Led by Eddie
Chandler (20-7), John Van Cuyk (18-8) and Willie Ramsdell (17-7), all eight pitchers on the staff had earned run
averages of less than 3.00. “They weren’t pitchers, they were flame throwers,” says Borom. “Except for Ramsdell. All
he had was a knuckler, but he had our number. He could throw his glove out on the mound and we were dead.” The Cats
also had great fielding and adequate hitting, but only one player from the ’46 Cat lineup was able to penetrate the
regular lineup of the ’47 Dodgers, a youngster named Edwin P. “Duke” Snider.

“I knew the Duker was a player the first time I ever saw him,” Schepps recalls wistfully. “After seeing him for
eight games I called George Trautman, general manager of the Tigers, and told him he ought to try to get him.
Trautman called Branch Rickey and offered him $100,000 cash money. Now that was a lot of dough for a 20-year-old kid
in AA ball. But Rickey was a catcher for Dallas in ’05 and ’06 and he knew us all too well. He told Trautman that if
the Jews thought that Snider was worth that much money, then the Christians would just hold on to him.”

Even though the Cats won the pennant, they still had to go through a ritual called the Shaughnessy Playoffs. The
playoffs were a gimmick copied recently by Southwest Conference basketballers to stir up more interest and make more
money. But under the Shaughnessy system only the top four of the league’s eight teams participated.

The Rebels were built around Prince Henry Kauhane (Hank) Ona, an ex-Fort Worth outfielder converted to a pitcher
before the war by Cat manager Rogers Hornsby. “Hank couldn’t throw hard enough to break a pane of glass,” recalls
teammate Lefty Altizer, “but he was real smart.” But since Hank could only pitch two or three times in the playoffs,
no one really held out much hope for the Rebels against the Cats, who had wiped out the Tulsa Oilers in four
straight in the playoff semifinals, while Dallas was edging the San Antonio Missions. But then no one had reckoned
on a .236-hitting, malaria-ridden ex-marine and UCLA blocking back named Hal Hirshon going wild. Inspired by the
screaming Rebel fans, Hirshon went on a homer binge to lead the Rebels to three wins in the first four contests. In
the fifth game, Cat fire-baller Eddie Chandler laid one right under Hirshon’s chin and decked him. The gritty
slugger got up and whacked Chandler’s next offering over the left field fence to destroy the Cats. In all, Hirshon
had four homers, all game winners, in the five-game Cat series – after hitting only nine in the entire regular
season.

Led by firebrand manager Al Vincent, the Rebels went on to whip Atlanta in four straight to take the Dixie Series, a
somewhat anticlimactic accomplishment compared to the conquest of the despicable but admittedly superior Cats.
Vincent was tough and he knew baseball. ’The only thing wrong with him was his temper,” says Schepps. “He hit an
umpire once and he’d been told that if he ever did it again he would be barred from baseball for life. So I had a
rule that every time he went out to talk to an umpire he would keep his hands in his back pockets. He wore out seven
sets of back pockets that year.”

The game was becoming a bit more polished in these post war years. There wasn’t quite so much in the way of
on-the-field free-for-all fisticuffs (“Why sometimes,” remembers Borom, “we would even go to supper with some of the
guys from the other team.” Such gentlemanly behavior would have been unthinkable in the days of Slim Love, Jake Adz,
and Snipe Conley, unless you had in mind poisoning your dinner guest.) But if the game was becoming just a mite more
civilized, the local rivalry was not diminished in the least.

“We’d do anything to keep from calling off a game with the Cats,” says Schepps. “In ’47, we came back from a road
series with Tulsa and the levee had busted. The water was up to the top of the dugouts. But we had the Cats that
night and I was damn sure going to get the game in. I got the fire department to send ten pumper trucks out there.
By game time the water had receded about halfway out to left field. We went ahead and played and gave anybody that
hit it in the water a ground rule double.”

Five days before the opening of the ’48 season, George Schepps sold the Dallas Rebels to Gladewater oil man R. W.
(Dick) Burnett. “I never dreamed of selling out,” says Schepps shaking his head. “In fact I didn’t have that much to
sell. I didn’t even own the land the park was built on. All I had was a few player contracts and some equipment. It
couldn’t have been worth over $200,000. But the week before the season opened, J. Alvin Gardner, the president of
the League, called me and said that there was an East Texas oil man who wanted to buy the team and was willing to
pay half a million dollars. I told Alvin that either the man wasn’t serious or he didn’t realize that what I had to
sell wasn’t worth that much. When the word got back to Burnett, he thought that I was holding out for more money. He
asked me to meet him down at the Baker Hotel where he said ’George, I’ll give you $555,000 for that ball club and
not a penny more!’ I said, ’Mr. Burnett, you’ve got yourself a team.’”

Burnett renamed the team the Eagles and the ball park Burnett Field. Lacking time to line up competent ball players,
the Eagles finished seventh. This was particularly galling to the Dallas fans since the Cats, who installed brash
Bobby Bragan as manager in mid season, won the pennant.

By this time, life in the Texas League was not bad. “It wasn’t any Detroit, but you couldn’t complain,” recalls Red
Borom. “We went everywhere by train except for Fort Worth. The rookies were making $400 or $500 a month, which was
good wages then.” This is not to say that Texas League owners were extravagant. The league bylaws proclaimed a
maximum player’s salary of $10,000 a year.

In the winter of ’48, Burnett went out and bought himself some ball players and opened the ’49 season with great
expectations. Proud of his new possessions, Burnett persuaded Governor Buford Jester to throw out the first ball to
Sheriff Bill Decker. 14,500 fans showed up at Burnett Field which only held 11,000, about a third of them spilling
over into the outfield. With one fell swoop of his pocketbook, Burnett had managed to line up one of the most
awesome murderer’s rows in the history of the league. Jerre Witte, Ben Guintini, Buck Frierson and Bill Serena
combined to hit 129 homers and drive in 459 runs that year. In the season opener the Eagles racked up 26 hits to
destroy Oklahoma City 23-2. By the first of May they had won 16 and lost 1. Then everything went to hell. Burnett
had forgotten to buy some pitchers to go with the hitters. The Eagles failed to make the playoffs again, which
proved somewhat of a frustration to Burnett. After an 11-6 loss on a hot August night, Burnett, who was not a
teetotaler, yanked the press box phone out by the roots and hurled it out the window, the best throw of the evening
for the home club. He then jerked the Western Union teletypes and tickers from their anchorages, proclaiming that he
wanted no word of this disgusting performance to reach the public.

Burnett did have one good idea in ’49. He hired “Miss Inez” Tedley to play the organ. “We were the first in this
part of the country to put an organ in a ball park,” Miss Inez remembers. “At first I didn’t know a hit from a miss
but you learn fast when you see 80 games a year.” When the opposing manager would make his second jaunt to the mound
Miss Inez would play “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” soon followed by “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” and
“April Showers.” An error called for “Careless Hands.” Arguments with umpires brought “Feudin’ Fussin’ and
Fightin.’” And if the Eagles were behind in the bottom of the ninth, which they often were that year, Miss Inez
would plead for “Just One More Chance.”

Meanwhile, back in Cowtown, to the utter dismay of the Dallas citizenry, the Cats were winning the pennant again
with 100 wins and only 54 losses. The ’49 team was perhaps the best of the era, loaded with future big leaguers,
including Cal Abrams, Dick Williams, Carl Erskine, Chico Carrasquel, Carroll Beringer, Billy Loes, Turk Lown and
Preston Ward.

After lulls in the action in ’50 and ’51.. Burnett decided to stir things up and hired the Texas League’s first
black player. Dave Hoskins had done little to distinguish himself in his professional baseball career except for
once having a sore arm for four years. But, the local fans were curious to see what Hoskins could do. After all, the
year before they had seen Cleveland’s black slugger Luke Easter in an exhibition game hit what looked like a
two-iron shot over the theretofore impenetrable center field wall, a blast that was still rising when it
disappeared. So a fairly good crowd turned out for Hoskins’ opener – which he won, though not commandingly. But
Burnett was not satisfied with the local response to his phenomenon. He announced that at Hoskins’ second start an
airborne paratrooper would parachute down to the mound and hand Dave the game ball. Fortunately for Hoskins, who was
already as nervous as a county commissioner at a horse race, and for the paratrooper, who could just imagine a
misfire into the odoriferous Trinity River, it rained and the game was cancelled. Hoskins endeared himself to the
Eagle fans that year by beating Fort Worth like a drum. “The Cat fans gave him a hard time at first,” says ex-Eagle
pitcher Joe Kotrany. “But after they saw that he could pitch they respected him and didn’t treat him any worse than
the rest of us.” Dave wound up with 22 wins overall against only ten losses, and contributed a .328 batting
average.

Near the end of the ’52 season, the Dallas fans began to realize that their boys just might win the pennant
outright, something they hadn’t done since 1936. With a six-game lead and six games to go, they went to Fort Worth
for a three-game series. The second-place Cats smeared them the first two games, and sent out to the mound their
best, Elroy Face, for the third. The Eagles countered with 20-game winner Hal Erickson, the other half of their
awesome one-two pitching punch. Erickson held the Cats scoreless and bolstered his .161 batting average by driving
in the game’s only run. It was sweet; right there in the Cat’s own yard, the Eagles clinched the pennant.

For the ’55 season, the Fort Worth Cats, seeking to regain their winning ways, fielded what in retrospect was
undoubtedly the smartest team in the history of baseball. Dick Williams (of Oakland A’s managerial fame) played the
outfield when he wasn’t razzing the Eagles as head bench jockey. George Anderson (later dubbed “Sparky” as manager
of the Cincinnati Reds) was an obscure second baseman. The two of them now have enough World Series rings to start a
second hand jewelry store. Danny Ozark, who was to become manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, was on first base.
Norm Sherry, who was later to manage the California Angels, was behind the plate. And three future major league
coaches rounded out that hoard of baseball knowledge: Carroll Berringer, Bob Milliken and Joe Pignatano. The ’55
Cats finished 6th, their worst performance of the postwar era.

Over in Dallas, things were picking up again, courtesy of Mr. John “Red” Murff. Murff had played amateur and service
ball and at the age of 27 decided he would take a shot at the pros. By the age of 32, he had worked his way up to
the pitching mound of the ’53 Eagles and was now really beginning to blossom. In ’55, Murff won 27 games for the
Eagles to lead them to another pennant, walking away from the more intelligent Cats. But, just as in all of the
seasons before, when Dallas and Fort Worth hit the field, it didn’t really matter who was in first place and who was
in sixth. It didn’t really matter how good or how bad the Cats were, how hopeful or hopeless the Eagles’ season
happened to be. The rivalry was always the thing. Every victory was one to be savored, every defeat was one to be
mourned. “Every time we went to Fort Worth,” says ex-Eagle Joe Kotrany, “the fans would pelt us after the game with
parking lot gravel all the way from the dressing room to the bus – no matter whether we’d won or lost.”

But in that summer of 1955 when “Red” Murff snatched a last Eagle pennant from the claws of the Cats, an era ended.
The feud began to fizzle. Before the ’56 season, Dick Burnett had died. Showy, impatient, unorthodox, Burnett
perhaps did more to keep minor league baseball alive than anyone else in postwar America. His heirs ran the Eagles
for a while, then gave way in 1958 to local contractor J. W. Bateson. Bateson renamed the team the Rangers, a funny
name for a baseball team. Shortly thereafter, the two cities of Dallas and Forth Worth formed a joint entry in the
Pacific Coast League and in 1965 returned to the Texas League but still as a companion enterprise. There, until
1972, they stayed and played, on the neutral Arlington turf, as the Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, in sickening brotherly
love.

ERRORS

& HITS



Best Hitter. Eagle outfielder Buck Frierson would be a cinch selection for All Star designated hitter.
Unfortunately, the Texas League didn’t have one. Frierson could hit the long ball and was one of the best natural
line drive hitters the league has ever known. If he could have reached balls hit to him in the outfield before they
stopped rolling he would have made the majors.

Worst Hitter. There were a lot of bad hitters though most didn’t last long. But Eagle shortstop Clyde Perry
was such a slick fielder that he stayed in the league while various managers prayed he would learn to hit. During
much of the 1949 season he hit seventh in the batting order behind Guintini. Witte, Frierson and Serena. This was
like having four guys walk out to the mound and flail you with willow switches and then have the fifth bring you a
cold Pearl and an order of nachos. But as they say. time heals all wounds. Perry’s lifetime batting average would be
lost somewhere near the median of several of our recent Texas Ranger entries. Red Borom says that if Perry were
playing now. he’d be in the majors and making $200,000 a year.

Best One-armed Outfielder. Contrary to what might logically be assumed, Eagle outfielder Pete Gray was not
the Texas League’s only one-armer, just the best. In fact Gray was such a fine athlete that he spent a year in the
majors with the St. Louis Browns. And he was not a promotional pawn like Bill Veeck’s midget. The year before his
tour of duty with the Browns, Gray hit .333 and stole 68 bases with Memphis of the Southern Association. Gray lost
his arm at the age of six, while living in a Pennsylvania coal mining town when he fell off a grocery truck he had
hitched a ride on. He was in the twilight of his career by the time he caught on with the Eagles but could still run
like a purse snatcher.

Best Infielder. Chico Carrasquel played only one year with the Cats, but Texas League old-timers still marvel
over him. The Venezuelan had a sensational season with Fort Worth, often making it appear that there was a tenth
fielder, like a rover in softball, where hits should be going.

Best All-around Player. In 1948, outfielder Irv Noren of the Cats hit .323 and demoralized opponents with his
uncanny ability to cut down runners trying to go from first to third. He also led League outfielders in double
plays.

Best Arm. Not one of the pitchers, not even Irv Noren, but rather Dallas third baseman Bill Serena. He could
throw a pingpong ball through a screen door. “He was born with that arm,” George Schepps says, “but when he first
came up he was just as likely to throw it up on the roof as he was to the first baseman.”

Worst Fielder. Like Buck Frierson, Vernon Sloan “Gawge” Washington was born too soon. He would have been a
classic designated hitter, not having to get tensed up and worn out dodging fly halls. Washington was 42 scars old
when the Eagles called him up in 1950 from Gladewater where he had led the East Texas loop in batting the year
before with a .387 average, striking out six times in 512 at bats. He never wanted the promotion to Dallas because
it was too far from his farm. To show his disdain he would swing at every pitch in batting practice, both the near
and the far. never missing. He had left the White Sox years before because there was no place to fish. After the ’50
season, during which he whacked a number of pinch hits up against the wall. Gawge finally got to go home.

Best Announcer. Jerry Doggett, butonly on home games. He had been discovered by Schepps broadcasting forthe
lower league Longview Longhorns.On out of town encounters, Doggettmade a feeble attempt at dramatic,simulated
re-creation.There were no prerecorded crowd noises or simulated batcrackings, just a tiny bell like those usedon
cleaning shop counters to ring forservice. He would dramatize a singlewith one ding, a double with two, andso on.
But once in 1947, Doggett was soexcited over Rebel hurler Bobby Hogue’sno-hitter that he blurted out what Hoguehad
done before starting his simulatedcall of the game. He later left Dallas togo with the Brooklyn Dodgers, probably
for a bigger bell.