Gainesville Owls

The Gainesville Owls, based in Gainesville, Texas, were one of eight founding franchises of the Big State League in 1947, giving the small Cooke County seat five seasons of professional baseball through 1951. Gainesville sits in North Texas near the Oklahoma border along the route of the historic Chisholm Trail, the cattle drive path that pushed longhorns north through the region in the decades after the Civil War, and the city's ranching and agricultural heritage defined the area long before the postwar minor league boom arrived.

One of the Owls' most notable players was Lon Goldstein, a former Cincinnati Reds infielder who joined Gainesville in 1947 and remained for four seasons. Goldstein hit .340 across his Big State League career and went on to coach at Carter Riverside High School in Fort Worth for 35 years, serving as athletic director for the Fort Worth school system and earning Texas Athletic Director of the Year honors in 1975. Gainesville's Locke Field, where the Owls played, hosted an early Elvis Presley concert during the 1950s and was not demolished until 2015.

The Big State League was a Class B circuit that ran from 1947 through 1957, fielding teams exclusively from across Texas. Named for the state's reputation as the nation's largest, the league stretched from the Gulf Coast to the plains of West Texas, bringing professional baseball to cities the higher-classification Texas League had never reached.