In 1951 the little Southwestern Kansas town of Sublette had a population of less than 1000, but it was home to a semi-pro baseball team. The Sublette Swatters played in the Tri-State League against teams in Liberal, Kansas, Hooker, Oklahoma and Perryton in the Texas Panhandle.
Their home base might have been the smallest in the league, but the Swatters were definitely the best-dressed team around. They were managed by a Sublette wheat farmer named Ed Watkins who believed ‘it only cost a little more to go first class’, at least when it came to baseball.
Mr. Watkins had been a lover of the sport for many years, managing a town team in the 1940s and serving as manager, patron, and all-around best booster for the Swatters. He ordered two sets of uniforms, one plain white and one white with blue Yankee pin stripes.
Ed also outfitted a 1939 Buick with loud speakers and would drive through town on game days reminding residents to get out and support the team. The car was also used to announce the games in the absence of a public address system.
Many in the community would park their cars around the edge of the field, in the absence of bleachers, and sit on the fenders and hoods to watch the Swatters play. With Ed’s help, money was raised to install the first light poles in the field so they could offer night games just like the big boys from the big towns.
Several Swatters on the rosters of the early fifties had played in the minor leagues, and Ed employed them as farm hands, rewarding them with easier work schedules when they won their games.
When the Swatters disbanded after the 1955 season, Ed stored the uniforms in some old locker boxes from a local meat locker plant. He packed 30 uniforms away in chewing tobacco in order to keep the mice and moths out. When Ed died in 1977 the baseball uniforms remained in the meat lockers, quietly waiting for the next big game.
And that event occurred ten years later, when the uniforms made a grand entrance on the musical theater stage at Garden City Community College.
Known for its big musicals that drew performers and audiences from a wide area, the college drama department decided to produce the Broadway hit, Damn Yankees. The director and costume designer were struggling with a way to come up with suitable uniforms that would suggest the 1950s wool flannel, baggy pants era of the sport in a time when form-fitting polyester was all the rage.
Enter the Sublette Swatters uniforms, with the chewing tobacco shaken out and the snappy outfits donated by the daughter of baseball mentor and manager Ed Watkins. He didn’t get a chance to see their theatrical debut, but they were definitely the stars of the show.
Now, they reside in the Haskell County Historical Museum, right next door to the fairgrounds and that original field where semi-pro baseball was born in Sublette, courtesy of Ed Watkins and the Sublette Swatters.
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Thanks to Ida Jo Faurot and Skip Mancini for providing information used in the writing of this story. For High Plains Public Radio, I’m the Damn Yankees costume designer, Gay Morgan.
(The late Gay Morgan contributed her considerable creativity to community theatre, High Plains Public radio, gardening and working with children.)
HPH is a production of High Plains Public Radio
