Minor League Ball: The Dallas Rangers — 1958-1964

by Paula Bosse

dallas-rangers_1959_ebay

by Paula Bosse

Now there’s a baseball pennant.

“YES WE ARE AAA.” (Apparently triple-A ball had different cleat allowances back in 1959.)

My knowledge of baseball? Pretty limited. I knew that Dallas had professional teams leading up to the Texas Rangers, but that’s about it. Here is a 1958 team photo of the Dallas Rangers, a minor league team that lasted from 1958-1964, known for a couple of those years as the Dallas-Fort Worth Rangers. (This team, by the way, has no historical connection with the present-day Texas Rangers.) They played at Burnett Field. Again, I know precious little about this sort of thing, but, from what I can gather after a hasty skimming, they weren’t very good. The faltering franchise moved to Vancouver in 1965. To Canada! I like this photo. From a purely Americana perspective, the best sports team photos are always, for me, those of  baseball teams.

baseball-dallas-rangers_burnett-field_1958(Click for larger image. Won’t be any sharper, but it’ll be slightly bigger.)

baseball-texas-league_burnett-field_1957

dallas-rangers_dmn-blog-det_102512

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Since I don’t know what I’m talking about, there will be a lot of links.

Top photo of 1959 pennant is from Ebay — which, as of THIS MINUTE, is currently available for purcha$e, here.

The 1958 team photo and 1959 program — I’m not sure where I found them months ago, but I think it might have been here. (As I’m looking at the page right now, all the photos are inactive — but the site may just have exceeded its monthly bandwidth. Lots of good info on the teams that played at Burnett Field, though.)

Bottom image of pennants from a Dallas Morning News blog post by Robert Wilonsky, here.

Dallas Rangers Wikipedia page here.

Info on Burnett Field here.

And, for those who are really into this sort of thing, the team stats for that 1958 team pictured above can be pored over here.

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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.