Travelers Bring Natural Game to the Natural State

That the Arkansas Travelers currently have the worst record in the eight-team Texas League may seem poetic to those familiar with the long history of baseball’s struggles in central Arkansas and the fact that the sun is surely setting on the state’s only baseball shrine — Little Rock’s Ray Winder Field.

The area’s baseball fans have a history of not knowing what they’ve got until it’s gone, and the imminent abandonment of the game’s longtime sanctuary will uproot central Arkansas’ natural ties with its baseball past only to usher in a modern beginning.

Still, the one who knows the rickety old ballpark better than anyone else has willingly come to terms with the move from Ray Winder Field, one of the state’s last links to baseball’s golden era.

“Nostalgia is the only thing you’re going to lose when we move from Ray Winder Field across the river to the new downtown ballpark,” said Bill Valentine, a 31-year veteran as Travelers general manager. “To be very honest, Ray Winder Field has outlived its usefulness as a professional baseball park simply because of the changing of the times.”

Surely there will be those who, while sitting in newly crafted plastic seats with plenty of leg room and enjoying a pricier hot dog, will long for the cramped wooden seats at Ray Winder Field and the musty smell of its nearly 75-year history in Little Rock.

“It’s time to evolve and to move on now,” Valentine said. “Maybe it’s easier for me because I’m the one dealing with the plumbers and the maintenance guys on a weekly basis just to get through the season.”

Come April 5, 2007, Arkansas will be the fifth team in the Texas League to throw out a first pitch in a spanking-new ballpark in the past three years.

There are also civic resolutions filed with hopes of luring minor league teams to play in new stadiums in both Springdale and Jonesboro — evoking days past when quality baseball filled stadiums from El Dorado to Pine Bluff to Hot Springs to Fayetteville.

Baseball’s Beginnings

Long before Ray Winder Field, Arkansans were as afflicted by America’s love affair with baseball as anyone, beginning with the earliest newspaper account of a game on May 6, 1867.

It detailed a match between “Pulaski and Galaxy” played at the arsenal grounds, which is now MacArthur Park.

Apparently, defense was not emphasized, as Pulaski won 67-15. The losing pitcher in that game went on to gain fame in the military, in law, in science and poetry, but obviously not in baseball. His name was Albert Pike.

MacArthur Park may well be Arkansas’ forgotten “baseball heaven,” as the thousands of federal troops stationed at the arsenal played daily.

“With no wars in the making, the soldiers drilled and dress paraded enough to meet regulations and played ball the rest of the time, to the high pleasure of Little Rock citizens,” according to an Arkansas Gazette article in 1942.

Fans paid a quarter to watch, and much of the time the games were played as fundraisers, bringing in as much as $60 a game.

Leagues of Their Own

According to Arkansas Gazette research, Little Rock’s first affiliation with a professional baseball league came in 1887, when the Southwestern Baseball League fielded teams in Fort Smith, Pine Bluff and Hot Springs, along with Webb City and Springfield in Missouri.

The Little Rock team played at the Little Rock Jockey Club at the Clinton Park Race Track, which “was one of the great racing centers of the South,” according to the Gazette. The site is now the Little Rock National Airport.

True professional baseball began play in central Arkansas in what was then called the Southern League in 1895, but the team didn’t even finish the season.

“It wasn’t an uncommon thing back then not to finish. I guess the team ran out of money and they were buried in the cellar,” said Jim Bailey, longtime Arkansas sportswriter and baseball historian. “In fact, they claim some jokers called the Southern League the ‘Fourth of July League,’ because a lot of teams tended to disappear in the middle of the summer.”

Bailey said the league was defunct in 1900, but when it reorganized in 1901 it was called the Southern Association.

The league stuck, though the Travelers struggled to get through each season after posting many losing campaigns and poor teams.

“In the old days, pennant winners could be deeply appreciated at Little Rock, because they appeared just a shade oftener than Halley’s Comet,” Bailey wrote in his book “90 Years of Travelers Baseball.” The Travs won pennants in 1920, 1937, 1942 and 1951.

Meanwhile, in the 1920s, the Cotton States League fielded teams in Pine Bluff, El Dorado, Hot Springs and Helena, as well as in Mississippi and sometimes Louisiana, while the Arkansas-Missouri League briefly highlighted cities in the northwest corner of the state.

The Man and the Park

The Travelers moved into what is now Ray Winder Field on April 13, 1932, after leaving Kavanaugh Field, which is now the site of Little Rock Central High School’s Quigley Stadium.

In 1958, Ray Winder, the stone-faced, gruff and business-minded leader of the Travs, along with his advertising executive co-owner, John P. Baird, sold the Travelers to Shreveport.

The deal mostly flew far under the radar since the team hadn’t drawn successful numbers in the win column or at the gate in nearly a decade.

In fact, Minor League Baseball’s popularity was waning all over America.

“Up until the time when television started squeezing people out of going out at night in order to stay home and watch TV instead, there was just a general fold-up in the 1950s of some of the smaller leagues and markets,” Bailey said. “It was inevitable that two or three would fail every year.”

For the first time in 44 years, Little Rock spent the summer of 1959 without a baseball team. And then, of course, the public wanted it back.

The Southern Association let go of its bankrupt New Orleans franchise that summer, and its owner, Charles Hurth, visited Little Rock to find a buyer.

The community eventually rallied around the cause and citizens began buying anywhere between $5 and $1,000 worth of stock to land the team.

“To this day, we’re probably the only baseball team owned by the community, much like the Green Bay Packers in the NFL,” Valentine said.

Winder was able to find the team a spring training site and put to use his multiple big-league connections to land enough players to field a team.

“He more or less single-handedly kept baseball going here on a shoestring basis for many, many years,” Bailey said.

Valentine, who grew up working at the stadium around Winder as a boy, said there’d be no baseball if it weren’t for the frugal businessman.

“If he wouldn’t have been around, we wouldn’t have been around when I came along, and baseball would’ve been a void in Little Rock for a long time,” he said. “He was able to squeeze every nickel out of this franchise in order to keep it open.”

In 1966, Travelers Field was renamed in honor of Winder, who passed away in 1967.

Future Fastballs

Bill Valentine has carried the Travelers the last 30-plus years in much the same fashion that Winder did — with frugal fingers and a close eye on the bottom line.

As the game evolved as more of a source of entertainment, so did Valentine and his shenanigans to get people to the ballpark, including exploding humans in caskets in between Saturday night doubleheader games and midget wrestling, to name a few.

One thing consistent during Valentine’s stay was the lack of commitment from municipal coffers to keep the grand old ballpark up to speed.

“I’ve been here 31 years and have never received a nickel from city, county or state government, not even five cents,” Valentine said. “As far as the facility of Ray Winder Field, they’ve never contributed a penny. I bet we’re one of the only ballparks in the minor leagues that wasn’t built by the city or get some funds to help.”

Though the basic structure is sound, still with its original wooden roof and seats and concrete base, the field’s landlocked geography and its aging infrastructure has prompted its move to taxpayer-funded Dickey-Stephens Park on the banks of the Arkansas River in downtown North Little Rock.

With midtown redevelopment currently a hot topic, the future of Ray Winder Field remains a question mark. The field was recently listed by the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas as one of the state’s most endangered landmarks.

“What our purpose really is is to say, ‘Hey, this is an interesting facility and one that has a lot of legacy to the city, and hopefully some good creative minds and thoughts will go into how to address the issue,” said Mark Stodola, president of the alliance. “There’s a lot going on with midtown development and how it relates to War Memorial Park as a whole, and so we’ll see what comes out of it.”

Valentine said that whatever comes of the friendly neighborhood park, it will take a strong dedication to make it work.

“The first thing you have to ask is, ‘Who will maintain it?'” he said. “That’s a grand gesture to say ‘Save it,’ but answer the maintaining question first and then ask, ‘How well are you going to maintain it?’ If you don’t maintain it, it will rot right in front of your eyes.”

And if history repeats itself, only when it’s gone will Arkansans want it back.

Click here to view the Travelers’ 2006 schedule.