Baseball a source of civic pride in Acadiana

Old timers will remember the Evangeline Baseball League that stirred south Louisiana passions into the 1950s, earning a reputation as the “Hot Pepper League” because fans were just as likely to see a brawl as a base hit.
But heated rivalries were well entrenched across south Louisiana before the league began in 1934 – some of them going back almost to the Civil War.
Rummaging through south Louisiana newspapers published between 1870 and 1900, I find references to teams in Royville (Youngsville today), Broussard, St. Martinville, Fausse Point, Lafayette, Franklin, Carencro, Opelousas, Eunice, Bridgeville (St. Landry Parish), Washington, and Ville Platte. A story in the New Iberia Enterprise reports on a game between the “Cranes and the Brownies,” but doesn’t say where those teams are from.
Teams from the little community of Pilette, midway between Lafayette and Broussard, were among the most consistent winners in those days, and it appears the south Louisiana baseball bug bit first in that area; The Lafayette Gazette reported in 1893 that “the base-ball craze … has reached Royville.” Later that summer The Weekly Messenger noted that “the boys from [St. Martinville] went to [Broussard] to play a game of base-ball and got beaten.”
Apparently that was a long summer for St. Martinville’s boys. A week later The Messenger reported a loss to the Fausse Point nine, “though [the game] was hotly contested.”
There was a second game that day between teams made up of a mixture of players from Fausse Pointe and St. Martinville. The Messenger said that game was “so good … it would have done credit to professionals.”
Hopefully the professionals had gained a bit more stature than they enjoyed two decades earlier. In 1877, the editor of the Opelousas Courier decided: “Base ball, of which this country was once so proud as a manly out-door sport, has sunk into the mire.” He said the games had become “a gambling transaction, pure and simple,” and expressed the opinion that “professional base-ball … has ruined nearly every young man who has undertaken to make a living by it. As a healthy outdoor exercise for boys, base-ball cannot be too highly commended; as an employment for grown-up men, it sinks below contempt.”
By the 1890s, players on most of the south Louisiana teams apparently received some pay, albeit not much. The winners of a game played during the 1892 Fourth of July celebration at Donato’s Pasture near Opelousas split a $20 purse.
When the Lafayette Favorites were organized in 1895, they said they would play “for money or for glory.” I find no report on whether they collected either.
As best I can tell, the teams were not part of any organized league during the early days – they simply challenged each other. The Louisiana Central League, formed in 1915, may have been the first to be made up only of teams from the area. The first four in the league were Youngsville, Broussard, New Iberia, and St. Martinville.
The Weekly Messenger’s report said “games will be played under the Big League Rules, [and] the umpire … will have power to remove any objectionable player.” There had apparently been some problem with officiating in games past. In 1894, for example, there was a big to-do after the Lafayette team walked off the field in a game against Carencro. The manager of the Lafayette team claimed that they had no choice, as the umpire provided by Carencro was too creative in his decisions.
“We claim to be informed as to the latest rules governing baseball playing,” the manager wrote to the newspaper, “but confess ignorance of the regulations governing the rulings of the umpire of our opponents. … We are certain we can easily defeat the Bayou Carencro club in a fair and square contest, and we offer to play a game with them for any size purse, providing it be not on their own grounds and provided a disinterested umpire be chosen.”
The Messenger was optimistic that St. Martinville’s team would finally find glory in the new Central League, proclaiming, “These games will give life to St. Martinville and … when the season ends, we expect our club to come out with the pennant.”
But, alas, it appears that as in the days when they played Fausse Pointe, the town’s nine still had to settle for moral victories instead of actual wins. The newspaper put the best light on it after a fifth straight loss in that inaugural season: “The Youngsville team is composed of the fastest college and semi-professional players in south Louisiana, and the fact that St. Martin held them down as well as they did, deserves notice.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.