We do know for certain that Atz was born in Washington, D.C., in 1879. Like many boys of his day, he was fascinated by the new game of base ball and learned how to play. By 1902, having already assumed his new last name, Atz got his first taste of the major leagues with Washington. It was a brief taste; 10 at bats and just one hit later, the young second baseman was back in the minors.
It took Jake Atz five seasons to get another shot at the big leagues. This time he stuck with the Chicago White Sox for three seasons, but his batting average never got above the mid-.230s. Atz was a scrappy kid who'd do anything to get on base; but when he stepped into a pitch from legendary fastballer Walter Johnson, the resulting hip injury put Atz out of the big leagues for good.
Atz still loved baseball and wanted to be part of it. His first try at managing in 1911 with Providence turned out as badly as his major league playing career. Still, he had a reputation as a smart baseball man, and in July of 1914 Walter Morris decided Atz might have a better chance than Kid Nance to lead the Cats out of their season-long doldrums. Atz didn't; under his guidance, Fort Worth only managed to win 29 of its remaining 63 games.
Nance began the 1915 season at the Panther helm. With Fort Worth struggling around .500 in mid-June, Atz was summoned again. This time he guided the Cats to more wins than losses; they went 50-41 for him and finished third in the league.
Frank Weaver--now in control of the franchise--kept Atz on for the 1916 season. Like his predecessor Morris, Weaver believed he knew enough about baseball to run the Cats himself. Halfway through the 1916 schedule, the Cats played a home game in which their starting pitcher was hammered by opposing hitters. Weaver expected his manager to pull the struggling hurler. Atz left him in the game. Weaver started shouting for a substitution. Atz ignored him. Furious, Weaver stormed out on the field and yanked the pitcher himself. Equally furious, Atz resigned as Fort Worth's manager. He was replaced on the spot by Otto McIver.
Mark Presswood:
"By that time, J. Walter Morris had been elected president of the Texas League. He was disgusted with what Weaver had done, and began hunting around for someone new to buy the Cats from Weaver and assume team ownership. Will Stripling, a Fort Worth businessman, was Morris' choice, and Stripling said he would only be interested if Morris would find him a smart business manager to handle the team finances and day-to-day operations. Morris put Stripling in touch with Paul LaGrave.
"Paul LaGrave was born in Missouri. He grew up in St. Louis and turned out to be a pretty good baseball player. He turned pro, and from 1903 through 1905 was the third baseman for the San Antonio Broncos in the Texas League. That's where he met J. Walter Morris, who was a teammate. LaGrave went on to play minor-league ball for a number of other clubs, including ones in Greenville, Mississippi, and Helena, Arkansas. He even managed a team in Fort Smith. When Morris and Frank Weaver originally took over the Cats, Morris hired LaGrave to work for them. He wasn't in any decision making capacity then. Morris felt like he knew enough baseball to run the team himself.
"But he didn't have the same kind of faith in Frank Weaver, particularly when Weaver humiliated Jake Atz like that. So when Morris was asked by Stripling to recommend a good baseball man, he was eager to tell him about Paul LaGrave."
La Grave was, by all accounts, something of a baseball genius. What he didn't know about the game before joining the Fort Worth club, he learned faster than anyone would have thought possible. Within months, La Grave had established a nationwide network of baseball-savvy friends who helped him track down the best professional players who weren't under contract to major league franchises. He never raided other minor-league clubs, but he was always ready to snap up quality performers whenever they were legally available. Perhaps his best acquisition, though, was the manager he believed Weaver should never have let get away. In 1917, Jake Atz was back in the Fort Worth dugout, and he stayed there for most of the next 13 seasons.
Bobby Bragan:
"Jake Atz was a great manager; to me, he was in every way the equal of the wonderful Connie Mack of the Philadelphia A's. Atz was a smart baseball man who could teach his players how the game was played, and a man who was tough enough to make them listen to him. He had a great advantage in that Paul LaGrave made certain the best Cats players stayed with the team. Atz never had to start from scratch at the beginning of a season. He had his nucleus and could build around it."
World War I was underway, but the 1917 Texas League season wasn't affected. The Cats finished in second place, trailing Texas League champion Dallas by 5 1/2 games.
By 1919, however, the war forced a shortened schedule. But the 1919 season also gave the first indication that the Stripling LaGrave-Atz troika was up to something special. LaGrave used his informal scouting network to bring some outstanding players to Panther Park. Perhaps foremost among them was a blocky first baseman named Clarence Kraft, nicknamed "Big Boy" and an instant fan favorite. Kraft had enjoyed only the briefest of major-league careers, three at bats in 1914 with the Boston Braves in the National League. During his seven seasons with the Cats, Kraft set Texas League batting records that stood for four decades; one, his 196 RBI total in 1924, has never been broken. He was the heart of a powerful, speedy offense that eventually included outfielder Ziggy Sears, a hitting machine with a consistent .300 batting average; Dugan Phelan, who had more major-league experience than most Texas League players combined; Bobby Stow, the shortstop who boasted no man alive could field better than he; and catcher Possum Moore, who owed his nickname to a strong facial resemblence to that creature.
As good as the Panther hitters were, the team's pitchers may have been better. Lefty Joe Pate won a minimum of 20 games five times during the Cats' amazing 1919-1925 championship run; in two of those seasons, he won 30. Right-hander Paul Wachtel complemented Pate with six 20-win seasons of his own. Unlike Pate, who eventually made it to the majors, Wachtel was resigned to a minor-league career. His best pitch was a spitball, which had been outlawed in the National and American leagues, but not in Texas.
Cats fans took these colorful players to their hearts. Shreveport won the first half of the 1919 season, with the Cats in second place. Fort Worth edged Houston for the second half title and met Shreveport in a best-of-seven series to determine the 1919 Texas League champs. Shreveport won the first three games; the Cats came back to win the next two. Game six ended in a 2-2 tie; Shreveport won the seventh game, and the league title, when Fort Worth lost 6-5.
It was the last time for six seasons that the Cats would finished second in their league to anyone.
Bobby Bragan:
"From the beginning, Fort Worth fans had always loved players with some personality. The name of the game was entertainment. Kraft and Pate and the rest weren't the first Cats who had personality. One of the players with an early Fort Worth team was named John King. He was a left-handed batter who feasted on the pitches of right-handers. But King could not hit a curveball thrown by a left-hander if he knew ahead of time that it was coming. So anytime he had to step into the batter's box against a southpaw, he would point his bat at the pitcher and snarl, 'Don't throw me a curveball if you want to live.' He meant it. The Fort Worth fans ate it up.
"King was a mean, mean man. One time an opposing infielder, Wally Dashiell, who would be my manager when I played in the minor leagues, pulled the old hidden-ball trick on King. He made the mistake of gloating, "John, take a look at what I've got!" King screamed, 'You son of a bitch, don't touch me with that ball!' and chased Dashiell clean off the field and under the stands. Dashiell kept yelling over his shoulder to King that he swore he wouldn't tag him, but he couldn't stop running because King kept hollering, 'I'm going to kill you, boy!' I suppose one of the braver umpires eventually had to rule King out for leaving the playing field.
"King eventually didn't play well enough to justify his remaining on the Cats roster. I've been told that his manager just couldn't summon up the courage to tell King he was through. So he got a bright idea. Whenever Fort Worth was on the road, King enjoyed sitting on the front porch of the hotel where the team might be staying. So the manager went to a window a couple of stories over the porch and wrote a note to King telling him he had been released. Then he lowered the note on a string and dangled it in front of his now-former player.
"I'm happy to say King's story ended well. He never did make it to the major leagues, but he went into business around Fort Worth and made a fortune. Probably the people he did business with were afraid not to let him make a big profit on every deal."
The 1920 baseball season was momentous, both nationwide and in Fort Worth. Locally, Atz's Cats, as the newspapers often referred to the team, made a mockery of the Texas League race. The Cats eventually found themselves ahead of second-place Shreveport by 8 1/2 games. Trying to maintain fan interest in cities other than Fort Worth, league officials again split the season so the first and second-half champions could be matched at season's end for the overall title. They needn't have bothered. Fort Worth won the second half by 12 games. The Cats' season, though, wasn't quite through.
Bobby Bragan:
"J. Walter Morris and Paul LaGrave talked with Amon Carter, the publisher of the Star-Telegram in Fort Worth. Together, they contacted Bob Allen, whose team from Little Rock had won the Southern Association title, and suggested a post-season series between their respective champions. The Southern Association was supposed to be a better league than the one in Texas. The Cats beat Little Rock four games to two. That made the Cats the champions of the whole South and Southwest, a whole lot of territory. And because of the media interest in baseball that was spreading all across the country, you better believe baseball fans everywhere heard about this super team from Fort Worth."
After the 1919 season, the Boston Red Sox had traded a pitcher and sometime outfielder to the New York Yankees. The Red Sox owner invested heavily in theatrical productions and was short on cash; the Yankees provided the cash and secured the services of Babe Ruth. Ruth became an instant superstar, walloping 54 home runs in his first Yankee season. The biggest papers were in New York and neighboring northeastern cities; soon the news wires were full of baseball stories. This was the beginning of the 1920s and an American sports Golden Age.
For the first time, professional sports dominated headlines. (Even two or three years earlier, collegiate rowing competitions between schools like Harvard and Yale were considered more important stories than whether the Yankees beat the Red Sox in that day's game.) Baseball's earlier biggest headlines were reserved for the so-called Black Sox scandal in 1919. Eight Chicago players, including all-time great Shoeless Joe Jackson, were banned for life after being accused of conspiring to throw the World Series to the underdog Cincinnati Reds.
Now baseball was what America was talking about. In much of the country, the talk centered around whether the Fort Worth Cats would hold their own against Ruth and the Yankees. More than a few Texas fans were convinced they could.
Bobby Bragan:
"Maybe not in every game, of course, but I would not have dismissed Jake Atz's chances in many games against major-league teams. Atz was a fine manager. Don't underestimate what he and the Cats could have done."
Ruth has a special place in Fort Worth baseball lore. When Atz's Cats faced the Yankees in an exhibition game, Fort Worth pitcher Jimmy Walkup struck out the Babe three times in a row. Ruth didn't like it. Afterwards, he told Cats outfielder Ziggy Sears, "I could kick 'em up there harder than that guy throws." Later, Ruth added, "I'm in the big leagues, and he ain't."
Vincent Devaney:
"You hear the Walkup story all the time, but Ruth got a lot more hits off us than any of us ever struck him out. I pitched against him in an exhibition game, too, though after I left the Cats. The game was somewhere back east. There was a big fence in right field, a high hill behind the fence, and a higher mountain behind the hill. First time up against me, Ruth hit a ball over the fence, over the hill and almost over the mountain. He laughed while he was running around the bases.
"The second time he came up, I did better. He hit a line drive off the first baseman's chest and only got a single. Of course, they had to carry the first baseman off the field."
The 1920 season--Fort Worth's composite record was 108-40- was no aberration. Over the next five Texas League seasons, the Cats won 107, 109, 96, 109 and 103 games. Fort Worth's success was shared by the entire Texas League; the NAPML promoted it to an "A" league ranking.
1921 found the Cats atop the minor-league baseball world. They weren't entirely alone there. In Baltimore, owner/manager Jack Dunn was in the middle of guiding his Orioles to seven consecutive International League pennants. Dunn had previously been best-known for signing Babe Ruth to his first professional contract. Now he proved his talents went beyond recognizing a single great player.
In a sense, Baltimore and Fort Worth complemented each other. Publications like The Sporting News covered their seasons in almost as much detail as those of major-league clubs. The two teams would never meet, and perhaps it was just as well. Fans of each were convinced their team would easily defeat the other; if for no other reason, transportation problems kept the matchup from taking place.
Some believe the Cats' superlative 107-51 season in 1921 cemented the team's greatness. Two good years in a row was not uncommon among Texas League franchises; this third title proved the Cats were way ahead of the pack. Position by position, they glittered. Possum Moore was still behind the plate; his .298 batting average was third-best among the starters. Big Boy Kraft remained at first, and in 1921 he slugged 31 homers, knocked in 141 runs and batted .352. Tex Hoffman held down second, while "Topper" Rigney replaced Bobby Stow at short. Rigney eventually joined the Detroit Tigers. The rest of the everyday lineup found Frank Haley at third, Ziggy Sears, Cecil Coombs and Dugan Phelan in the outfield, and either Joe Pate, Paul Wachtel, Bill Whittaker or Lefty Johns on the mound. Pate pitched 333 innings in 52 games, winning 30 and losing just nine. The Cats' cumulative earned run average was 2.75.
Since the Cats won both halves of the Texas League season, they automatically advanced to the Dixie Series. The Southern Association was willing now to enter into a formal, annual matchup with the Texas League champs. Since the Texas League had joined the Southern Association as an "A" league, the series could be billed as a contest between equals. It was that in name only. The Cats blew away Memphis; their fans could and did claim their team was the best among all minor-league squads.
1922 found Will Stripling and Paul LaGrave buying out other partners to take complete financial control of the Cats. It was another walkover season for Fort Worth; the Cats won both halves and were never seriously challenged, even when the Wichita Falls Spudders ran off 24 consecutive victories. It would have been 25, but opponents in that game charged Wichita Falls players with doctoring the baseball and a league investigation confirmed the accusation. It was an odd season for the Spudders. In June, their ballpark caught fire during a game and burned to the ground. Twenty-seven years later, Fort Worth players and fans would know almost the same feeling.
In 1922, Big Boy Kraft won the first of three consecutive league home-run titles. His 131 runs batted in led the league, too. Wachtel's 26 wins were the most of any Texas League pitcher, and Lefty Johns' 21-5 mark was the highest overall winning percentage. Johns also topped the league with a 2.34 earned run average.
Cats' fans were confident heading into the Dixie Series against Southern Association champ Mobile. But Atz's Cats lost, despite the presence during away games of hundreds of screaming Fort Worth fans. Amon Carter had leased a train, dubbed the "Dixie Special," to ferry Cats fans from Texas to Alabama for the games. Cats backers unfortunate enough to be left behind in Fort Worth were able to follow the games on a huge downtown scoreboard. 1922 was also the first season WBAP radio broadcast some Cats games.
In 1923, the Cats did it again. They slipped to 96 wins, but still took the Texas League regular-season title by 13 1/2 games over second-place San Antonio. Atz had his usual core of veteran stars, and New Orleans was no match for Fort Worth in the Dixie Series.
There was no reason for Cats fans to suspect their beloved dynasty was in danger of slipping back to the rest of the Texas League pack. In 1924 Kraft, Pate, Phelan, Moore, Wachtel and the rest were still on the Fort Worth roster.
Bobby Bragan:
"Big Boy Kraft just went crazy at the plate in '24. He hit 55 home runs, batted around .350 and knocked in 196, still the Texas League record. He was the kind of guy who thrived on attention; the more he got, the more he wanted. He used to tell people that if his name didn't get in the newspaper often enough, he was tempted to punch somebody in the nose just so a reporter would write a story about it.
"Around this time, the Cats were openly hated by other teams in the Texas League. They beat everyone so much, and the Fort Worth players believed it was almost impossible for them to lose. One of the reasons it is so hard for any professional sports team to win its league consistently, besides the problem of keeping a team's players together, is overcoming the focus every opponent has of wanting to beat you more than anyone else. Ballplayers of any era are competitive by nature. The few times Fort Worth would lose each season, you can be certain the players on the teams that beat them celebrated far into the night."
Because of the Cats, the Texas League gained a reputation as one of the best minor leagues anywhere in the country. The league's image was also helped by the success several Texas-born players were achieving in the major leagues, Tris Speaker the best-known among them.
1924 marked the sixth consecutive season the Cats led the Texas League at year's end. In the Dixie League Series--now described in print by The Sporting News and other prestigious publications as the "Little World Series"--the Cats crushed Memphis. All was right in the Fort Worth Cats' world until Big Boy Kraft informed Paul La Grave he was retiring from baseball, effective immediately.
Bobby Bragan:
"At the time he announced his retirement, Clarence Kraft was 37 years old. There was no reason to believe he could not have kept up his impressive production at the plate. But Kraft had other ideas, and it's hard to blame him. He had no intention of leaving Fort Worth; he wanted to use his popularity there to greater financial advantage. So Big Boy purchased a Ford dealership downtown and waited for customers to rush in, all wanting to brag to their friends that they purchased their new cars from the great Big Boy Kraft. It didn't work out quite that way. The dealership became crowded with visitors, but no one wanted to buy a car. Instead, they all wanted to talk baseball with Kraft. Finally, he felt forced to post a notice that no one could come in and discuss baseball without purchasing a car first.
"As with many former Fort Worth players, Kraft's post baseball life in his adopted hometown was a happy one. Eventually he was elected a county judge, and he served in that office with distinction. And, unlike what many baseball fans in the state predicted, the Cats proved in 1925 they could win even without their most feared slugger."
Mark Presswood:
"Paul LaGrave was up to the challenge of replacing Kraft. He put his nationwide baseball contacts to good use and signed Big Ed Konetchy to take Kraft's place at first base. All Big Ed did in 1925 was hit .345 and lead the Texas League with 41 homers and 166 RBIs. Paul Wachtel won 23 games, the Cats won both halves of the 1925 Texas League season, and they finshed 103-48. Actually, the Cats didn't win the second half of the season. They tied Dallas. Jake Atz challenged Dallas to a best-of-five playoff series. The Cats won the first three games, and then, as Texas League champs for the sixth year in a row, they whipped Atlanta four games to two in the Dixie Series."
Then, gradually, it all fell apart for the Cats. Besides having Atz as manager, the key to the team's continued success was keeping its best players season after season. Konetchy had been able to step in for Kraft, but in 1926 Joe Pate went on to pitch for Connie Mack and the Philadelphia A's. He pitched well, too, compiling a perfect 9-0 record. Jimmy Walkup, who replaced Pate in the Cats' rotation, won 22, but the consistent level of high play that had characterized Fort Worth was gone. The Cats finished third in the Texas League in 1926. Their 83-73 record left them 6 1/2 games behind league-leading Dallas. No one panicked. Will Stripling still owned the team and Paul LaGrave still ran it. If 1926 hadn't brought with it a seventh consecutive Texas League title, it had included a new Panther Park just a few blocks east of the old one. This park was considered a wonder; it was the first in the league built with steel as well as wood. Despite their heroes' third-place finish, Cats fans kept filling the park, too.
1927 and 1928 were more of the same; the Cats finished fourth and third. One by one, the stalwarts from the glory years dropped off the roster. Atz still managed the club, but Wichita Falls, Dallas and Houston dominated Fort Worth and the rest of the league.
Paul LaGrave died unexpectedly just before the 1929 season. Stripling re-named Panther Park LaGrave Field in his honor, and then looked for a buyer for the club. He didn't want to own the Cats if LaGrave wasn't there to run the team for him. Ted Robinson, a businessman who'd previously dabbled in other Texas League franchises, was glad to acquire the famous Cats. On July 1st, the new owner did the unthinkable: He fired Jake Atz and replaced him with Frank Snyder.
Atz wasn't out of a job long. Dallas, now calling its club the Steers (they'd later be named the Rebels, Eagles and Spurs), Fort Worth's arch rival, hired Atz as its manager for the 1930 season. Without his old core of Cats greats, Atz couldn't do much. Dallas finished the year 58-93. Atz would continue to manage minor league clubs through 1941, including one short stint back at the Fort Worth helm in 1933. But the Atz magic was mostly used up; there was only one full-season first-place finish in his future, in 1939 with Henderson of the tiny East Texas League.
With Atz gone, with Kraft selling Fords, loyal Cats fans were left to wonder just how good the 1919-1925 Fort Worth teams had really been. Could they have held their own in the major leagues? Even today, it's a matter of unresolvable debate.
Bobby Bragan:
"Jake Atz was a great manager, just great. He didn't win much after he left Fort Worth, but even the best managers can't win if they don't have the horses. Plenty of fine players were on the Cats' rosters during those great years in the '20s. Pate, you might recall, had a perfect record pitching for Connie Mack in the American League in 1926. Kraft would have been a feared hitter at any level. Had those Cats been magically placed in the American or National League of their era, they might not have knocked off Ruth and the Yankees, but they wouldn't have finished last, either."
Bob Bluthardt:
"Of course, in the minds of their fans the Fort Worth Cats of the '20s were the equivalent of the New York Yankees. The Cats won and they won and they won. There were certainly very successful minor-league teams that, because of sustained success, had a legitimate regional following. Baltimore under Jack Dunn is a good example. But Fort Worth may have represented the largest area of territory of any well-known team, those in the major leagues included. The Cats belonged to Fort Worth and, in a larger sense, to the West and South. They gave people in those regions the chance to look to the northeast and boast, 'We've got something great that you haven't got. They're ours.'
"How good were Jake Atz's Cats, really? Look at how many of his players went on to bigger, better things in professional baseball after they left Fort Worth. A few did. Most didn't. But I would think it is not as important whether the Cats were as good as most major league teams, but whether the Fort Worth fans believed their team was playing on a major-league level. The Cats served the purpose of their community. They gave their city and their region a reason to feel proud.
"That was the beauty of it, really--the Fort Worth Cats existed in their own little world, and the people of Fort Worth and the Southwest appreciated what they had."