Even with more than a century’s worth of gambling, cheating, corked bats, juiced balls, juiced players, designated hitters, labor strikes, a canceled World Series, interleague play, monster salaries and monster ticket prices, baseball is what is. It’s still timeless. It’s still historic.
No sport has ever been more romanticized. No sport evokes quite the same familial emotions from generation to generation.
For most sports-minded little boys, baseball is usually the starting point. It’s playing catch with the old man in the backyard. It’s getting the right batting stance and swing to maximize the impact. It’s catching flies and skinners. It’s hearing the chatter. It’s cutting up in the dugout. If you have girls like I do, you can call it softball but the same principle applies. The ball is just fat and yellow.
Baseball lends itself to the passing on of legacies whether participating or taking in live action.
For decades in these parts few sports-oriented things captured the essence of family and community any better than the old Cen-Tex Amateur Baseball League.
Starting circa 1930, the teams and towns of this league fluctuated from year to year, but it managed to maintain a presence on area diamonds into the 1970s until slow-pitch softball and youth baseball crowded out adult baseball.
It was a league meant for fun, but it was organized. The Telegram sponsored the league and sportswriters for years oversaw the league along with a board of advisors. It was still our best nine against your best nine with plenty of pride and titles on the line.
At one time or another, seemingly every conceivable community fielded a team. Of course the more established towns like Temple, Belton, Rogers, Troy, Granger, Bartlett and Little River had teams over the years. But communities like Joe Lee, Seaton and Burlington had clubs as well as others with names like the Moffatt Charcoal Burners, the Pendleton Ginners, the Westphalia Farmers and the Seattle Dark Horses. (I thought I had a handle on Central Texas geography, but Seattle located near Flat in Coryell County was a new one on me.)
This was a Sunday afternoon league. There was plenty of time to attend church and have Sunday dinner before heading to one of these outposts for a full nine-inning game. High school and college students on summer break competed in the league alongside men well into their 20s and 30s.
The peak years for the Cen-Tex League had to be the late 1940s through the 1950s. There were plenty of high-caliber players in the league that many thought could easily have been playing for paychecks and not just for exercise every summer Sunday. Players like Gene Main, Carl Craft, T.J. Ludwick, Harry White, Bill McLain, Frank Philley, Fats Lancaster, Cullen Ingram, Johnny Palla, Cotton Brisbin, Gus Houston, Dolph Irby, Joe McMurtry, Joe San Miguel, Raymond Hoelscher, Marcine Cottle, Leroy Entrop and Al Ogletree to name just a few who gave the league considerable creditability and character. It was fun, but it was also good baseball.
Another old boy whom I knew pretty well excelled many years in the league. He was a nifty right-hand throwing first baseman and left-hand hitting slugger who could hit a ball a country mile and for average to boot. His name was Charles Woodson Waits, but everybody just called him “Cotton.” It was commonly believed my grandfather could have hit major league pitching, but the timing and scouting never lined up. Plus, he had a ranch in Joe Lee to manage, not to mention five boys running around the house.
A few years of playing ball left a lifetime of memories and stories to pass along. Cotton was never at a loss for one.
One fellow built a home just beyond the right-field fence of the old Bartlett field when Cotton played for a team there. The man wasn’t that interested in the games, but he always managed to appear on the front porch with glove in hand when Cotton came to the plate. He had a picture window he didn’t want to see shattered.
The fans had a tradition in which they passed a hat in the stands after someone hit a home run. Cotton often came home with $15 or $20, a good chunk of change in those days.
Cotton was still playing ball into his late 30s. He could still hit the ball hard, but his legs were starting to betray him. He knew his playing days were nearing an end one afternoon in Little River, playing as he did for several years with the Temple Distributors managed by Temple McLain, when he was rounding first and heading for extra bases. His legs gave out and he had to crawl into second. Right then he recalled promising “the Good Lord if He would let me finish the season this would be it.” And it was in 1956.
Cotton enjoyed other sports, but baseball was his game and he knew it well. The last time I visited him about a month before he died in the fall of 2003 he was still talking baseball and telling stories I’d heard many times, but never minded.
He spoke of the time his father pulled him and his brother out of school in 1929 to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play in a barnstorming exhibition at Katy Field in Waco. He remembered getting a couple of hits off Bobby Layne - the Texas and NFL football legend who was also a superlative baseball pitcher - with a tinge of pride maybe mixed with a little disappointment that he didn’t yank one out of the park.
The last thing he said before I left was a brief comment on society. He said, “The world just needs to get back to Christianity.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
