Waco Pirates
The Waco Pirates, based in Waco, Texas, gave the Big State League its most dramatic story across nine seasons from 1947 through 1956. The franchise opened under the Dons name in that inaugural 1947 season before affiliating with the Pittsburgh Pirates, then under the direction of the legendary Branch Rickey, and adopting the Pirates name in 1948.
The low point came in 1952, when the Pirates finished with a 29-118 record, 56 games behind the first-place Temple Eagles. It stands as one of the worst single-season records in the history of professional baseball at any level. Then came 1953, and a different kind of disaster. On May 11 of that year, an F5 tornado tore through downtown Waco, killing 114 people and destroying much of the commercial core, including Katy Park, the Pirates' home field. The team shifted home games to the road and eventually relocated to Longview for the remainder of the season, playing in the ballpark vacated by the Longview Cherokees, who had folded the year before. Despite the upheaval, the Pirates finished 77-68 and qualified for the postseason playoffs.
What followed in 1954 was one of the finest seasons any minor league team has ever produced. Waco went 105-42, finishing 13 games ahead of the second-place Tyler Tigers, then won the Big State League championship in the playoffs over the Corpus Christi Clippers. Baseball historians Bill Weiss and Marshall Wright, compiling their ranking of the 100 greatest minor league teams of all time for the 2001 centennial of the National Association, placed the 1954 Waco Pirates 25th on the list. The engine of that season was outfielder Roman Mejias, who began a 55-game hitting streak on June 6 at Galveston, the third longest in minor league history, and carried it through August 2 at Austin. Mejias was promoted to the major league Pirates the following year, and on April 10, 1962, hit two home runs for the Houston Colt .45s in the first major league game ever played in Texas.
A piece of history connected to the 1947 Dons season also deserves mention. Monty Stratton, the Chicago White Sox pitcher whose career was cut short when he lost his leg in a hunting accident in 1938, played for the Waco Dons that inaugural season as part of his return to professional baseball on an artificial leg, a comeback that inspired the 1949 Jimmy Stewart film "The Stratton Story." The site of Katy Park, where the Pirates played most of their home games, is now Magnolia Market at the Silos, the Waco landmark developed by Chip and Joanna Gaines.
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.
