Tombstone
Born: 1949
Folded: 1954
First Game:
Last Game:
Big State League Championships: None
Stadium
Ownership & Affiliation
Owner: Community-owned (Lionel Campbell, president of stockholders group)1Raborn, George.”Great Backing Pays Off For Home-Owned Eagles”. The Tribune-Herald (Waco, TX). September 9, 1951
Major League Affiliation: None
Attendance
Background
The Temple Eagles were an independent minor league baseball team out of the Central Texas city of Temple during the early 1950’s. The Eagles competed in the Big State League, an all-Texan loop that played at a lower designation (Class B) and generally in smaller cities than the Class AA Texas League. Temple had a population of just over 25,000 in the 1950 census, though the city is considerably larger today (~78,000).
The Eagles were community-owned, with a group of approximately 230 local stockholders backing the team during the 1951 season.2Raborn, George.”Great Backing Pays Off For Home-Owned Eagles”. The Tribune-Herald (Waco, TX). September 9, 1951
Two Eagles players, pitchers Tom Simpson (Eagles ’49) and Bill Tremel (Eagles ’51), eventually made it to the Major Leagues. Both pitched briefly for the Chicago Cubs during the 1950’s.
Temple also had Lon Goldstein from 1951 to 1953, a 30-something first baseman who had a cup of coffee in the Majors for Cincinnati in 1943 and again in 1946. Goldstein won the Big State League batting crown in 1951 with a .376 average.
Temple’s finest season came in 1952. Under player-manager Salty Parker the Eagles had the best record (85-62) in the 8-team Big State League that summer. But the Eagles fell to the Texarkana Bears in the opening round of the playoffs.
Demise & Aftermath
From 1950 to 1952, Temple was one of the the Big State League’s best draws, welcoming over 100,000 fans through the Legion Field turnstiles each summer. In September 1951, George Raborn, a sportswriter for the Waco Tribune-Herald, declared Temple “the best baseball city for its size in the entire nation.”3Raborn, George.”Great Backing Pays Off For Home-Owned Eagles”. The Tribune-Herald (Waco, TX). September 9, 1951
Temple’s subsequent downward spiral into oblivion mirrored the fate of minor league baseball in hundreds of small cities during the 1950’s as aging ballparks, the spread of television and suburban sprawl contributed to a mass die off of teams. Temple’s attendance crashed by 70% between 1952 and 1954 and team required a bailout from fellow Big State League clubs to complete the 1954 schedule. The Eagles went out of business at the end of the season.4NO BYLINE. “Only Temple, Del Rio Missing At Loop Huddle In Galveston”. The Morning Telegraph (Tyler, TX). September 27, 1954
Three years after the Eagles folded, the Big State League returned to Temple midway through the 1957 season. The Port Arthur Redlegs, a Cincinnati Reds farm club, pulled up stakes at the end of May due to poor attendance in Port Arthur and moved to Temple. At the end of the 1957 season, the Big State League itself went out of business, drawing the pro baseball era in Temple to a permanent close.
Ex-Eagles player/manager Salty Parker went on to a long career as Major League coach and served (very) brief stints as the interim manager of the New York Mets in 1967 (11 games) and the Houston Astros in 1972 (1 game).
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