Update 7-3-2025
In case you missed: Complete Games, Pitching a Maddux, and the Good Luck, Bad Luck of Johnny Sain and Hank Feldman:
This week’s Backroads and Ballplayers Weekly
Independence Day and Arkansas Baseball
During the days when baseball was Arkansas’ game, July 4 was a special day. In the first half of the 20th century, every community of significance had a baseball team, and the Independence Day picnic and ball game were rural traditions.
Town Teams
In the Arkansas Baseball Encyclopedia, Caleb Hardwick gives the designation of the first game between town teams to a well-publicized contest held on Independence Day, 1868. The contest matched a team calling itself the “Rock City Base Ball Club” and a contingent of farmers from Pine Bluff.
The Pine Bluff contingent arrived two days early to immerse themselves in the excitement of the upcoming contest. Newspapers carried the story on the front page, and a shaded seating area was hastily constructed to protect the delicate city folks from the mid-summer sun.
Newspaper coverage of the contest is sparse, but apparently, the two teams battled until both daylight and energy were in short supply, with Rock City eking out a 43–36 victory. In a show of goodwill: “Three cheers were made, as well as a ‘tiger’ for the umpire.”
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No Love Lost - More Town Teams Adventures
Things would not always be that cordial. In 1904, a young fellow from Russellville took town team baseball to a much more serious level.
The first Russellville baseball player to receive state-wide attention was a hot-tempered “town team” guy named Jackson Bennett Love. Unfortunately, his publicity was only indirectly related to baseball and more of a review of his lack of restraint. The disturbing escapade that earned Love his first newspaper headlines occurred 120 years ago.
Love played in more professional games than any Russellville-born baseball guy in Arkansas history. He was unquestionably the most prominent professional baseball player from the River Valley in the first two decades of the 20th century. Some of that attention came from his baseball accomplishments. Much of his publicity did not.
Love’s name first appeared in a state-wide baseball story at age 22. One hundred and twenty years ago this week the Russellville town team played a game in Conway, but Love’s story in the Arkansas Gazette offered no details of the game. It seems that on the way out of town, Jack thought he spotted a player from the Conway team who had earned his disfavor in the game. Still fuming from some unforgivable offense, the impetuous Love walked up behind the offender at the train station and hit him in the back of the head with a baseball bat. Tragically, Love had mistaken an innocent fellow named Charlie Jones for his revenge. Charlie just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time where Jack Love and his bat were settling scores. The Conway Ministerial Association was understandably riled up and demanded that all baseball relations with Russellville cease immediately.
Love must have had a good story. Although Love was charged with “assault with intent to kill,” Arkansas’ Boss Schmidt, manager at Springfield, Missouri, signed the impetuous young assailant to a minor league contract later in the summer. Perhaps Boss, who was known as a tough guy himself, apparently liked Love’s spirit. Somehow, in the summer of 1904, Jack Love had avoided a jail term and was getting his first pro baseball trial.
Love played for Texarkana in the North Texas league in 1905 and was player-manager at Hot Springs in 1906. Over the next 11 seasons, he would play in more than 1400 professional games. In most of those seasons, he played like a future big-league regular, but much of his notoriety came from his volatile nature.