Big league legends played in Orange

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[i]Good read in the Enterprise this morning[/i]





[size=8pt]By MARGARET TOAL
November 21, 2009
Posted: November 21, 2009, 10:00 PM CST[/size] 

The immortals once walked on the grass and dirt baselines of Orange's West End Park - flesh-and-blood baseball players, not ghosts or figures from a dream world.

Baseball manager Branch Rickey, a teetotaler, smoked and chomped on his trademark cigar there. Slugger Rogers Hornsby likely lost his famous temper there.

Connie Mack brought his Philadelphia Athletics to the park for a double-header. Baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis watched a game from the stands on a March afternoon.

All four are in baseball's Hall of Fame. And all four have the connection to Orange and West End Park, where the St. Louis Cardinals had their spring training camp in 1921 and 1922.

And though the baseball field was used by local teams for more than 70 years after the Cardinals left, few people driving on 13th Street in Orange today would realize a baseball field ever was there.

Lines for a middle school football practice field run across the old center and right fields. A 10-foot-tall mound of dirt is not far from what was once the home team dugout. Nearby, construction workers use heavy equipment and build an addition to the West Orange-Stark Middle School.

The stories about the days of glory are almost gone, too.

Read more in Sunday's Beaumont Enterprise.