History of the Texas-Oklahoma League: Minor League Baseball Circuit (1911–14, 1921–22)

The Texas-Oklahoma League (T-O League) was a Class D minor baseball league with teams primarily located in North Texas and southern Oklahoma. The league held its first season in 1911 with four teams in Texas (Wichita Falls, Cleburne, Bonham, and Gainesville) and four in Oklahoma (Durant, Ardmore, Altus, and Lawton). It was the only season to begin with bi-state parity. In subsequent seasons, Texas teams were predominant.

Initial Season (1911)

As was often the case with start-up minor leagues, the weakest franchises collapsed. Although eight teams started the 1911 season, only five teams finished it. The Lawton Medicine Men lasted for forty-eight games, the Gainesville Blue Ribbons folded after forty-nine games, and the Altus Chiefs held out through seventy-five games.

The five remaining teams played out the full season, and the Wichita Falls Irish Lads finished first with a 65–38 record. Wichita Falls players led the league in most offensive and defensive statistics. Art Naylor led in hits (136) and batting average (.377) while Clifford Witherspoon was the league leader in home runs with sixteen. Pitcher Hetty Green finished with a league-leading eighteen victories.

The 1911 team was a holdover from the 1910 Irish Lads, an independent team that played at a ballpark at Lake Wichita. They were not league champions, however. The split-season format dictated that they still had to defeat the second-half winners, the Cleburne Railroaders, in a best-of-seven post-season match-up. Though Wichita Falls was leading two games to one, the Irish Lads walked away after a dispute over gate receipts at Gorman Park in Cleburne. The head umpire declared a forfeit, not just of the fourth game but of the series, much to the chagrin of league president F. P. St. Clair, a Wichita Falls partisan.

One of the members of the Cleburne team who went on to play in the major leagues was catcher Frank Gibson, who played for the Boston Braves from 1921 through 1927. One of the three Cleburne managers in 1911 was Jiggs Donohue, who was coming off a nine-year major league career.

Second and Third Seasons (1912–13)

The T-O League returned in 1912, but only four of the 1911 franchises (Ardmore, Bonham, Wichita Falls, and Durant) returned. Cleburne had moved on to the South Central League. New cities in 1912 were Sherman, Denison, Greenville, and McKinney. Greenville and McKinney only made it through thirty-nine games each, which left six teams to play a full schedule. The Ardmore Giants finished first (62–32) with help from former Irish Lad Art Naylor, who again led the league in hits, this time with 105. Once again, however, the post-season was curtailed. Ardmore disbanded after Wichita Falls (rebranded as the Drillers) had won two of the first three games of the championship series. The Drillers were declared champions by default.

In 1913 all eight teams completed their schedules, though the Wichita Falls team moved to Hugo mid-season. The Paris Boosters and Texarkana Tigers took the places of Greenville and McKinney. The Denison Blue Sox finished first with a record of 82–39. No post-season playoffs were scheduled, so the Blue Sox were recorded as league champions.

The Blue Sox pitching staff was bolstered by two Texas-born pitchers. James Haislip, born in Farmersville and schooled at Texas Christian University, and Grady Higginbotham, born in Jameson and educated at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, won twenty games apiece—almost half the team’s victories. The league leader in victories, however, was Joe Pate, who won twenty-three games for the Texarkana Tigers. Twenty-one years old, he was in the early stage of a minor league career in which he would win 255 victories, including 187 for the Fort Worth Panthers of the Texas League, and two seasons with thirty wins (1921 and 1924).

Fourth Season and Collapse (1914)

The 1914 season began with the same eight franchises that had finished the 1913 season. However, the stability was short-lived. Four teams (Hugo, Ardmore, Bonham, and Sherman) disbanded before the end of the season, and left Paris, Texarkana, Denison, and Durant to compete for the championship. The Paris Snappers (77–39) and the Texarkana Tigers (79–41) met in the post-season. The latter defeated the Snappers three games to one.

Texarkana was led by Bill Stellbauer, who led the league in batting average (.351) and hits (151). Born in Bremond, Stellbauer had played college ball for Baylor.

The Paris pitching staff was led by Dickey (or Dickie) Kerr, a left-handed pitcher who led the league in victories with twenty-two. His 1914 season was the first of three seasons of twenty-plus victories for Kerr (he followed with twenty-one wins for the Fort Worth Panthers in 1915 and twenty-four for Memphis of the Southern Association in 1916). In 1919, his rookie year with the Chicago White Sox, he won the third and sixth games of a World Series that was tainted by allegations that White Sox players had been paid to throw games. Kerr, however, was above suspicion and was held up as an exemplar of integrity in sports. A longtime resident of Houston, Kerr received the inaugural Tris Speaker Memorial Award from the Houston chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America in 1961. A statue of Kerr was unveiled at the Astrodome in 1966.

Another young player who went on to a notable career was eighteen-year-old Rogers Hornsby, who split the season with Hugo and Denison. Considered by many to be the best right-handed batter in baseball history, by 1915 he was in the big leagues with the St. Louis Cardinals; beginning a twenty-three-year big league career that resulted in induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1942. He was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1955.

Another notable presence during the 1914 season was Kid Nichols, who managed the Bonham Sliders for part of their shortened season. Elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1949, he won 362 major league games (including seven seasons with thirty or more wins) from 1890 through 1906.

Revival (1921)

Given that half the franchises of the 1914 league didn’t make it through the season, it is not surprising that the league did not return in 1915. The league was revived for the 1921 season with five franchises in Texas (Paris, Bonham, Cleburne, Graham, and Sherman) and just one in Oklahoma (Ardmore). All teams played a full season, but the Graham Hijackers moved to Mineral Wells after twenty-nine games. Led by ace George Phillips, who led the league with a 26–5 record, the Paris Snappers (named after manager Red Snapp) finished first with a record of 89–38. Again, there was controversy in the league’s post-season. In a best of nine contest, Paris and the Ardmore Peps each won four games and tied in the ninth. The teams could not agree on the location of a tie-breaking game, and none was held, with both claiming the championship by default.

One 1921 T-O League player who later achieved fame was Terrell native Dusty Boggess, a seventeen-year-old who began his professional career in 1921 with the Cleburne Generals (the nickname derived from the town’s namesake, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne). Boggess played twelve seasons in the minors, served as a National League umpire from 1944 through 1962, and was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1973.

Final Season (1922)

In 1922 the league was back to eight teams. The Greenville Togs, Corsicana Gumbo Busters, and Mexia Gushers joined the league while the Mineral Wells Resorters dropped out. Corsicana native Doak Roberts, one of the founders of the Texas League, served as the T-O League president for its final season.

The Paris Snappers (with a 72–36 record) again led the league in 1922. Their offense was driven by Chink Taylor, who led the league with a .369 batting average, and Joe Bratcher, who compiled a league-leading 138 hits. Pitcher Sam Gray led the league in victories with twenty-three and strikeouts with 219.

The Cleburne Generals and the Bonham Bingers folded on July 22. The other six teams continued for another two weeks before the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 cut the season short on August 6. It was yet another anticlimactic end to a season. Even Doak Roberts had been unable to right the ship.

Although not as renowned as Roberts, Paris manager Snapp left his mark on minor league baseball in Texas. Born in Stephenville and educated at Texas Christian University, Snapp was named player–manager of the Paris team when the franchise shifted to the Western Association after the initial incarnation of the T-O League folded. Snapp continued playing through 1916, when he was the player–manager for Oklahoma City of the Western Association. In 1921 he returned as team president and manager of the Paris Snappers. After the T-O League folded in 1922, he managed various teams in other leagues and won championships around Texas for the rest of the decade before he retired from baseball to operate a service station in Dallas.

In 2025 three former T-O League franchise cities fielded teams. The Sherman Shadowcats and Texarkana Rhinos played in the independent Mid-America League, while the Cleburne Railroaders were the southernmost team in the American Association. A museum at the Cleburne ballpark, La Moderna Field, featured artifacts related to previous Cleburne teams.