The Best Little Ballpark In Texas [or Anywhere Else]

One hundred and forty-three miles into the range country southwest of Odessa, Texas, lies the hamlet of Alpine, a cow and college town that 6,800 residents call home. "We're so far out here that nobody thinks anything of driving 100 miles to get some dinner," says cattle rancher Chris Lacy. Alpine is the seat of Brewster County, the largest county in Texas in size (6,169 square miles) and one of the smallest in population (8,000). It is also the heart of the Big Bend region of Texas, so-called for the hard left turn the Rio Grande makes around the Chisos Mountains. The Big Bend is mostly open range, full of javelinas, cactus roses, mule deer, desert willows and legends, lots of legends.

There is the legend of the Twin Sisters, the pair of notched peaks three miles west of Alpine, named for the two Indian women who loved the same man and quarreled over him so bitterly that the Great Spirit turned them into a two-topped mountain to teach them better manners. And there is the legend of Bobcat Carter, a trapper who put pepper in his shoes to keep his feet warm, subsisted on a diet of prairie dog stew and lived to be 97 years old.

And there is the legend of the wealthy Alpine cattle rancher who loved both the game of baseball and his hometown with such consuming passion that in 1947 he built what is quite possibly the world's most beautiful ballpark. It was an idea dusted with magic, a summertime daydream of a ball field, surrounded by a 10-foot-high fence of native red stone, with a lush Bermuda grass outfield, rows of rosebushes, a luxurious manager's bungalow behind third base and a spectacular vista of the Davis Mountains rising beyond the fences. Like William Randolph Hearst's mansion, San Simeon, the Alpine ballpark was furnished with the choicest materials. Some 1,200 wooden chairs, complete with armrests and the ticket holders' names embossed on the backs, filled the bright green grandstand. The concession stands had roofs made of Spanish tile, and everywhere there were wrought-iron lanterns inlaid with baseball designs. Some of America's famed ballplayers—among them Satchel Paige, Norm Cash and Gaylord Perry—played there from time to time. But what made all this unusual in terms of West Texas legends is that Kokernot Field is real—as real as its builder, Herbert Kokernot Jr.—and every bit of the story you are about to read is true.

In the 1940s and '50s, most any small town you visited in this part of the country was sure to have certain things: a wide thoroughfare called Main Street, a diner, a honky-tonk bar with Hank Williams songs on the jukebox and a baseball team. The mid-20th century was the heyday of American baseball; never were there more teams or more ballplayers. Where now the lowest minor league classification, excluding Rookie League, is Class A, in the late 1940s the professional talent reached all the way down to Class D teams. And baseball's popularity was by no means limited to the professional ranks. Towns that weren't big enough to support, say, the Brooklyn Dodgers' third-best Class D team still had baseball of their own in the form of semipro town teams.

Today, semipro baseball has almost vanished from the land, but 40 years ago it was the best game in many a town. In the West, it meant something truly special. To this day there is an isolation about living in some parts west of the Mississippi. Wide-open spaces can breed an urgency in people to be a part of something—almost anything—social. Attorney Ken Sparks, who grew up in Oklahoma and spent weekends watching games between Alva and Woodward, Okla., recalls, "There was a craving for live entertainment. All week you were out there alone with the land and animals. Come the weekend you were ready to head into town for Saturday night dancing or Sunday afternoon baseball. I still remember the names of all the best ballplayers in Alva."

Some of the players on semi pro teams were kids from the local college who hung around for the summer, playing ball and taking dates to the diner. The rest of the team was made up of men who had spent their lives in the town. Having a good town team was a major source of local pride. Baseball as the national pastime was taken with the utmost seriousness, so that having a team that was best in the region or the state was an exciting proposition—like having an extra portion of the American Dream dished out to your hometown.

For some, a winning town team became an obsession. If a man happened to be both extremely wealthy and fervently concerned with the fortunes of the local nine, he might be inclined to help it out a little, perhaps by paying a star pitcher from two counties away to suit up for crucial games. This was perfectly legal in semipro baseball, so if this rich man took it one logical step further and began hiring the best players from the state's colleges to spend their summer vacations playing ball for him, come August he might find he had bought his town a juggernaut. Right there on the local diamond would be a semipro team capable of beating everyone in sight, even capable, perhaps, of holding its own at the annual National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita. If he kept this up—maybe even went outside the state to lure big-time semi-pro players to his little town, maybe even plunked down a few hundred per game for a faded major leaguer or two—well, that's how legends were made.

And, the truth was, legends were pretty much the coin of the realm in semipro baseball. The game certainly didn't generate any profit. In fact, there wasn't much to be gained from it unless you liked giving people the pleasure of watching a good game on Sundays and enjoyed the idea that your town might come to be known all across America for its marvelous baseball team.

Of course, if your name was Herbert Kokernot Jr., that was reward enough. Especially if one day 42 years later an old Texan like Flop Parsons would put his feet on the desk in his dusty Alpine real estate office and declare with authority, "Back in the early '50s, semipro baseball in Alpine, Texas, was raised as high as you can get."

It began one summer day in 1946. Kokernot, owner of the O6 (pronounced oh six), one of the largest cattle ranches in Brewster County, had recently agreed to take over the management of the Cats, Alpine's semipro baseball team, and on this day, as he drove the 15 miles from his ranch to Alpine, he was feeling pretty good. He felt good as he passed the white-faced Herefords that grazed on some of the O6's 320,000 acres. He felt good as he surveyed the odd, beautiful shapes of the mountains, greenish-brown in the summer heat. He always felt good about his visits to Alpine. On the hill above town was Sul Ross University, to which Kokernot annually donated bushels of scholarships—one year he handed out 52—so that young Texans might have the opportunity to make something of themselves. In the center of town was the post office, where Kokernot, or Mr. Herbert, as everyone called him, caught up on local news and gossip and received mail related to his substantial holdings in the Pearl and Lone Star breweries and the Fidelity Union Life Insurance Corp. On the edge of town—which in Alpine was very close to the post office—was the ball field he had just taken over.