Victoria Rosebuds · Victoria, Texas · 1910

Victoria Has Fastest Team in S.W. League

August 1910: an eyewitness reports on Jack Burke's Victoria Rosebuds. Every man, including Jack, is a star and they play together like veterans. The Houston Post concurs: the league can produce nothing to beat him, though managers like Trapper Longley and Piggy Page keep trying.

The scouting report arrives by word of mouth: “A fan who has been down in the Southwest Texas league territory” saw Jack Burke’s Victoria Rosebuds handle Beeville and came home converted. “They are playing some classy ball in the little league,” he warns, and fears the hometown Bronchos “would suffer in a comparison with Burke’s bunch. Victoria has them playing at top speed and their team work is a revelation. Every man, including Jack, is a star and they play together like veterans.” San Antonio would pull for the Rosebuds anyway, “because nearly the entire outfit are local boys, who learned the game on the lots in the Alamo city.”

Then the Houston Post files its own appreciation, and it reads like a lesson in team-building. “Victoria has everything else in the league outclassed,” even though “taken separately, almost every department has a superior somewhere else in the league. Brownsville has a better bunch of flingers, Corpus a better catcher, both the Brownies and Laredo better hitters, and so it goes. But still the Buds have the best of them all, because they have mastered the supreme art of team-work.”

The Post saves its best puzzlement for the competition: “Why other managers of experience, men like Trapper Longley and Piggy Page, were unable to do the same thing is beyond comprehension.” Readers of this site have met a Longley and a Page before, pitching against each other for San Antonio and Galveston on ladies day in 1891. Nineteen years later a Trapper Longley and a Piggy Page are managing in the same Texas league, which is either a coincidence or the most natural career path in the world. Burke, meanwhile, had “little professional experience himself,” and all he did with it was build a club “forced to hold the lead over even when it is an undesirable occupation.”