Earl Welton Caldwell: Texas Baseball Pitcher

Earl Welton Caldwell, a baseball pitcher with a twenty-nine season career (1926–54), was the eldest of five children born to Ernest Franklin Caldwell and Ovie Buford (Nunnallee) Caldwell. Earl Caldwell was born in Sparks (Bell County), Texas, on April 9, 1905. He played high school ball at Holland High School (also in Bell County), from which he graduated in 1922, and attended Thorp Spring Christian College in Hood County. He later embarked on a teaching career in Rogers (Bell County), which provided him with the nickname of “Teach.” He married Myrtle Calhoun in Bell County on August 16, 1926.

Caldwell’s professional baseball career began in 1926 after he pitched in an exhibition game against the Temple Surgeons of the Class D Texas Association. Roy Mitchell, the Temple manager, was impressed enough with Caldwell’s performance to sign him to a contract. A side-arming right-hander, Caldwell was so effective pitching for Temple that he soon moved up to the Waco Cubs of the Class A Texas League. The results were not spectacular (19–24 from 1927 to 1928) but they were good enough for the last-place Philadelphia Phillies of the National League to purchase his contract and offer him a chance to play big league ball.

After pitching a shutout against the Boston Braves in his major league debut on September 8, 1928, Caldwell tailed off in subsequent appearances and was returned to Waco for more seasoning. After the 1928 season, he went to work for the Harlingen Citrus Association. The Rio Grande Valley was his home for the rest of his life.

In 1929 Caldwell won twenty-one games and logged 219 innings for the Waco Cubs. Despite this record, he continued to toil in the minor leagues with Wichita Falls Spudders (1930) and San Antonio Missions (1934–35) of the Texas League and the Milwaukee Brewers (1931–33) of the Double-A American Association.

During Caldwell’s two-year stint with San Antonio, he won thirty-nine games, which attracted the attention of the Missions’ major league affiliate, the St. Louis Browns. Longtime doormats, the Browns brought Caldwell, age thirty, back to the big leagues for six games at the end of the 1935 season. He garnered three victories, one of which was a shutout of the pennant-winning Detroit Tigers. Caldwell’s full-season record in 1936 (7–16 with a 6.00 ERA) was of no help to a team that would finish with a 57–95 record. His performance did not improve in the early weeks of the 1937 season, so the Browns sold him to the Toronto Maple Leafs of the Double-A International League.

It was not unusual in those days for a former major leaguer in his thirties to revert to the minor leagues, as was the case with Caldwell. He remained with Toronto into the 1940 season, when he was sold to the Indianapolis Indians of the American Association. His minor league record from 1937 to 1940 was 33–60. Such results were not likely to win him a ticket back to the major leagues, but he did prove himself to be durable, having hurled 712 innings during that period.

Caldwell turned thirty-six just after the opening of the 1941 season, which he spent with the Fort Worth Cats of the Texas League. His age worked for his career, as the World War II military draft was beginning to snap up younger players. Caldwell won twenty-two games for the Cats in 1941 and twenty-one games in 1942, while leading the league in innings pitched, with 281 and 305, respectively. In 1943 he began a second tour of duty with Milwaukee. In 1944 he won a league-leading nineteen games at age thirty-nine and led the team to an American Association pennant. Again, he caught the attention of the major leagues, where older players had become commonplace due to the shortage of younger players.

Having finished seventh (in a field of eight) in the American League in 1944, the Chicago White Sox sought to bolster their pitching staff for the 1945 season. Working as a spot starter and reliever, Caldwell fashioned a 6–7 record with a 3.59 ERA (slightly better than the staff average) in 105.1 innings. Admittedly, many of the league’s best hitters were still in the military, but it was a decent showing for a forty-year-old hurler.

The post-war return of the younger ballplayers meant that many of the older players lost their jobs. This was not the case with Caldwell, who not only returned in 1946, but logged a record of 13–4 with a 2.08 ERA in thirty-nine relief appearances for the White Sox. Naturally, he was invited back in 1947. Due to injuries and personal problems (having divorced Myrtle, his first wife, he married Naomi Evelyn Yates on February 20, 1947, in Starr County, Texas), he was less effective in 1947 and the early days of 1948, so he was traded to the Boston Red Sox, which gave him the opportunity to participate in a pennant race at age forty-three. The Red Sox tied the Cleveland Indians for first place but lost the playoff game for the pennant. Caldwell had not been effective for the Red Sox. He had a 13.00 ERA in eight innings and did not pitch after September 15, with more than two weeks to go in the season. He ended his major league career with a record of 33–43.

Caldwell’s career continued after the Red Sox sold him to the Birmingham Barons of the Double-A Southern Association. He was an effective reliever in 1949 and 1950 for the Barons. Then in 1951, at age forty-six, he had an opportunity to play for the Harlingen Capitals of the Class B Gulf Coast League. The Capitals were more or less his hometown team, as he was a longtime resident of the Rio Grande Valley and played semi-pro ball there during the off-season. He won thirty-nine games for the Capitals in 1951 and 1952 and led the Harlingen Capitals in ERA with 2.22 in 1951 and 2.74 in 1952.

In 1953 Caldwell served as player–manager for the Lafayette Bulls of the Class C Evangeline League; he won eleven games and posted a league-leading ERA of 2.08. He split 1954 between the Corpus Christi Clippers and (as player–manager) the Harlingen Capitals, by then part of the Class B Big State League. The 1954 season, however, was the end of his playing career. At age forty-nine, Caldwell finally retired.

Caldwell logged twenty-four seasons in the minor leagues. While record-keeping is not as meticulous in the minor leagues as it is in the major leagues, a conservative estimate of Caldwell’s minor league career is that he won at least 302 games and pitched 4,664 innings. An exceptional aspect of his career was winning twenty games in four different decades: twenty-one for Waco in 1929; twenty for San Antonio in 1934; twenty-two and twenty-one for Fort Worth in 1941 and 1942, respectively; and twenty for Harlingen in 1952.

After retiring Caldwell worked as general manager of the Mission Citrus Growers, a cooperative farm association. He died of liver cancer on September 15, 1981, in Mission and was buried at Valley Memorial Gardens in McAllen. He was survived by his second wife, Naomi, who died in 2017; three sons, James, Larry, and Jon; and a daughter, Charlene. Earl Jr., his son by his first wife, predeceased his father by two years. A minor league catcher, Earl Jr., had served as his father’s battery mate with the Lafayette Bulls in 1953.

In 2007 Caldwell was posthumously inducted into the Texas League Hall of Fame based on his 137 victories for Waco, Wichita Falls, San Antonio, and Fort Worth. In 2013 he was inducted into the Rio Grande Valley Sports Hall of Fame.