America’s Game

I’ve been watching Ken Burns’ series on baseball this week while Louise is out of town. I don’t know why I had never watched it before. It reminds me that, even though I love college football, baseball is truly America’s game, the good and the bad of it. It seems that after every bad period, the game bounces back stronger than ever. Now if we can just do something to speed up the game, but change is hard to affect in such a large institution.

The series brought back memories of my playing days and what could have been, should have been, would have been, if only – – – – -. I remember my first days of playing as a 5 and 6 year old in the back yard of SGT Goff’s house in the Honeycutt neighborhood of Fayetteville. Then being picked by him to play on his Little League team when I was 8 years old. Then as a 13-year old in my first year of Babe Ruth League in Fayetteville, I was chosen for the All-Star team and was the leadoff batter. At that point, it was looking like I might have a future in baseball. We then moved to Sumter, where baseball took a back seat to several other activities, and where I made some really dumb decisions that I believe greatly affected my opportunities to play college ball. I was not allowed to play baseball my junior year in high school because of a fight during a basketball game, so I was not on any college team’s radar as a baseball prospect in spite of a pretty good senior year. I walked on to the Clemson freshman team and was selected for the team only to be told at the last minute that Coach Wilhelm was not going to allow the freshman coach to keep any walk-ons. He had more than enough recruited players and a very tight budget. Nine years later, Wilhelm would come to me and ask me if I was interested in playing for Clemson. He gave me a tryout and put me on the team roster only to learn a few weeks later that I was ineligible – too many years since I first enrolled at Clemson. He kept me on the team as a non-player/manager. That year, 1967, where I was allowed to take my reps at batting practice and work out with the team in practice, honed my skills to the point that I was able to have success playing a season of semi-pro ball in Texas between graduation and my army reenlistment for Officer Candidate School.

I worked that summer for a lumber company in New Braunfels, Texas, just north of San Antonio. I learned that there was a semi-pro team there called the New Braunfels Lions. I was introduced to the manager, Felipe Delgado, by my brother-in-law and invited to try out for the team. I was selected to the team and became the starting center fielder. Our team was composed mostly of Latin-Americans, but we had two other gringos besides myself. We played teams from Austin, Houston, Corpus Cristi, and Monterrey, Mexico, with some of the players being college players from the University of Tesas, Texas A & M, and Houston. We had one player who had made it as high as triple-A ball before he developed arm trouble. He was a great hitter, but he couldn’t throw. He played 1st base for us. I started off not hitting very well, but got hot toward the end of the summer and was batting fourth in the lineup. My greatest memory was hitting a homerun off a University of Texas picture. I don’t know what league we were in, if there was a league. Felipe managed the team and he worked hard finding teams to play. He recruited players mainly from San Antonio, Randolph AFB, San Marcos, Seguin, and Austin, and always had a competitive team.

Inspired by Ken Burns’ series showing some of the unique places where baseball has been played, I decided to look up the team and the park where we played in New Braunfels to see how accurate my memory was. I found, by googling New Braunfels Lions Baseball, an interesting site that describes the history of how the park and the team came to be. The park was established in the 1940’s after WW II ended by a first generation Texan and WW II veteran named Felipe Delgado (the man I was introduced to and played for). He and his wife built a baseball park and dance hall called the West End Dance Hall. The web site actually had pictures of the ball park and the dance hall. The baseball team was originally known as the Cardinals, but eventually the name was changed to the Lions – I don’t know why. The web site had a newspaper article from 1955 saying the Lions were the hottest semi-pro team in the state of Texas having won 17 straight games. The West End Dance Hall burned down in 1962 but was rebuilt. I didn’t know until my research over the past couple of days that the team manager when I played, Felipe, was the man who established the park and the team. I also learned that the Lions had a B Team called the Cubs on which Felipe Delgado pitched. He pitched a no-hitter in 1955, facing only 25 batters over 7 innings. He did not pitch for us in 1967 when I played, and I don’t recall there being a B Team then.

It was an interesting series by Ken Burns and, to me at least, interesting new information about the team I played for in Texas. That ended my baseball playing as I reentered the Army at the end of that summer and eventually was commissioned at OCS. I did play a lot of softball later in the Army though.

I guess you can tell that Louise is out of town as my mind tends to stray to the past when I’m home alone.