The Life and Legacy of Clarence Otto "Big Boy" Kraft: A Baseball Journey (1887–1958)

Clarence Otto “Big Boy” Kraft had no more than the proverbial cup of coffee as a major league ballplayer, but he managed to carve out a unique niche in baseball history. Kraft was born on June 9, 1887, in Evansville, Indiana. The eldest of five children of John and Anna (Meyers) Kraft, he was born on the same farm where his father was born. As he grew up, Kraft played baseball, basketball, and ice hockey and also participated in track and field competition. At the same time, he took an interest in automobiles. He worked as a car mechanic and salesperson before launching his baseball career.

Building a reputation as a right-handed hitter and pitcher on local sandlots, he came to the attention of professional teams in search of new talent. Standing six feet tall and weighing 190 pounds, Kraft was a “big boy” for his era, hence his nickname. While those vital statistics would not stand out today, his ability to wield a fifty-two-ounce bat would still make him an outlier. In 1910 Kraft’s hometown team, the Evansville River Rats, signed him to a contract. His stay there was brief (one game), kicking off a serpentine minor league odyssey—the fate of many young ballplayers. Kraft’s journey after Evansville included McLeansboro (Illinois), Toledo, Flint, New Orleans, Clarksdale (Mississippi), and Nashville. He pitched and hit, but as time passed his hitting skills came to the fore, and his time on the mound dwindled.

Eventually, he came to the attention of the Brooklyn Superbas, as they were called before the nickname Dodgers became popular. They drafted him from Nashville, but he never played for Brooklyn, who flipped him to the Boston Braves, with whom he made his major league debut in 1914. His stay with the Braves during the first two weeks of May was his only sojourn in the big leagues. Yet his mere presence on the Braves roster in 1914 was notable due to the team’s performance following his departure.

The Boston Braves had been one of the have-not teams in the National League. After losing 100 or more games each season from 1909 to 1912, they improved to 69–82 in 1913. Optimism that the team would reverse its fortunes appeared to be unwarranted well into the 1914 season. When Kraft joined the team on May 1, their record was 2–7. When Kraft left (after just three plate appearances), their record stood at 3–15. Halfway through the season the Braves were still in last place. Yet by August 1 they had clawed their way to a .500 record. During the next two months they won the pennant by 10 ½ games over the second-place New York Giants and swept Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s in the World Series. Thereafter, they were aptly referred to as the Miracle Braves. Kraft was a member of the 1914 Miracle Braves, but he left the team before they were miraculous.

Though Kraft’s participation with the Braves was a mere footnote in major league history, his separation from the team proved to be noteworthy. The Braves returned him to the Superbas, who tried to send him back to Nashville. A rule at the time stated that a player who was optioned or released from a major league team had to be offered to a Double-A level team before the team could send him to a team in a league with a lower classification. The Nashville Volunteers were in the Southern Association, a Class A league. The Newark Indians of the International League were a Double-A team, and they were also interested in Kraft. He refused to report to Nashville and began playing with Newark. The Base Ball Players’ Fraternity, a players union, threatened to strike if Kraft was forced to go to Nashville. Brooklyn owner Charles Ebbets paid Nashville $1,000 to withdraw their claim to Kraft, thus obviating a costly strike.

Kraft then began his second minor league odyssey. In addition to Newark, his stops included Harrisburg, Louisville, Milwaukee, Wilkes-Barre, and finally Fort Worth, where he spent the rest of his career and wrote his name into the Texas League record book. While many minor leagues shut down after America entered World War I in 1917, the Texas League did not do so until the following year. In 1918 Kraft, at the age of thirty, joined the Fort Worth Panthers. Batting .308 after seventy games, he was drafted in June. As more players were gobbled up by the war effort, the Texas League also shut down. Kraft’s automotive skills were put to use in the Motor Transport Corps. At the conclusion of the war, he returned to his home in Kansas City, Missouri, where he married Dorothy Blanche Goessling on October 25, 1919.

Kraft resumed his career with the Panthers. It was an ideal time to be a Panther, as the team not only dominated the Texas League but has come to be regarded as one of the great minor league dynasties. After losing the Texas League championship to the Shreveport Gassers in 1919, the Panthers reeled off six straight titles from 1920 through 1925. During that span, the Panthers prevailed in the post-season Dixie Series against the Southern Association champion five times, losing only once to the Mobile Bears in 1922. In 1922 and 1924 the Panthers won 109 games, still a Texas League season record. Kraft was the team’s regular first baseman, but his first two seasons were unremarkable. His 1919 season was fair (a .275 batting average with eleven home runs), but in 1920 he hit just .258 with six home runs.

Because he turned thirty-three during that season, observers might have assumed Kraft’s career was over, but they would have been wrong. As the Texas League was upgraded from Class B to Class A status in 1921, Kraft also stepped up his game. From 1921 through 1924 he dominated the offensive statistics of the Panthers as well as the Texas League. On April 23, 1921, in a game against Wichita Falls, Kraft hit three home runs in one game. That season he went on to lead the league in hits (212), total bases (376), runs (132), and batting average (.352). For good measure, he slugged thirty-one home runs. His success continued in 1922 and 1923, as each year he clubbed a league-leading thirty-two home runs with a slugging percentage of .589. It was a remarkable achievement for an aging ballplayer—but the best was yet to come, for both Kraft and the Panthers.

In 1924 the Panthers finished the season with a record of 109–41. The second-place Houston Buffaloes finished 30 ½ games behind. For his part, Kraft was not only having a season of personal bests, he was setting Texas League records. His season total of 196 runs batted in has never been surpassed by a Texas League batter (the major league record of 190 was set in 1930 by Hack Wilson). His fifty-five home runs set a new Texas League record, far in excess of the old standard (thirty-five) set by Shreveport’s Hack Eigel in 1921. Kraft’s total remained unsurpassed until 1956, when Ken Guettler, also of Shreveport, hit sixty-two. His 414 total bases and 96 extra-base hits were also Texas League records. In addition, Kraft scored 150 runs and had a .713 slugging percentage and a .349 batting average.

As impressive as Kraft’s season was, he couldn’t help but be frustrated about what might have been. With ten games remaining in the season, he had fifty-four home runs. Amon Carter, the renowned Fort Worth booster and media baron (his radio station, WBAP, started broadcasting Panther games in August 1922) offered Kraft $10,000 if he could break Babe Ruth’s major league record of fifty-nine. However, Kraft suffered a home run drought and did not hit his fifty-fifth home run until the last game of the season. He recovered during the Dixie Series against the Memphis Chicks, however, with three home runs in the fourth game.

Kraft’s six-year career with the Fort Worth Panthers resulted in some impressive totals. He held the franchise career record for home runs with 167 and runs batted in with 759. His .544 career slugging percentage was not just a Panthers record but a Texas League record. Curiously, the Detroit Tigers, who had been affiliated with the Panthers from 1919 throughout the 1920s, never showed any interest in promoting him to the big club. Kraft, who turned thirty-seven during the 1924 season, chose to retire while he was at the top of his game. He even turned down a $10,000 a year, two-year contract offer from the Panthers. This was better than what most major league players were earning. In fact, when the major league Cincinnati Reds inquired about his services, he politely refused.

Kraft had become something of a celebrity in Fort Worth. In fact, he relished it. According to Bobby Bragan, who managed the Fort Worth Cats from 1948 to 1952, “[h]e used to tell people that if his name did not 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.” Kraft took advantage of his name recognition and his knowledge of automobiles and purchased a downtown Ford dealership, which he operated as the Clarence Kraft Motor Company until 1942. Ford’s reasonably priced Model T, produced through 1927, had put millions of American families on wheels and helped give Kraft a reliable post-baseball source of income. Kraft was correct in thinking that his local celebrity status would bring in visitors. However, he found that most people who visited his dealership wanted to talk baseball, not buy a car. Eventually, he had to post a notice that any customer who wanted to talk baseball had to buy a car first.

Kraft was not through with the Fort Worth club, however. By 1932, the year the Panthers were officially rebranded as the Cats, the Great Depression had taken a toll on the team’s finances. Attendance, which peaked at 204,386 in 1926, had shrunk to 97,672 in 1931. Called in as temporary president of the club, Kraft employed his business skills to put the club back on track, after which he returned to his Ford dealership. Following his retirement from baseball, he took an interest in golfing and was head of the gallery committee for the National Open held at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth in 1941.

With the advent of World War II, Ford shifted from making cars to making tanks, trucks, and other instruments of war. The shift in production made running a car dealership a difficult proposition. Kraft, however, took the opportunity to go in a new direction—politics. Thousands of Fort Worth residents had seen Kraft play ball or bought an automobile from him, so when he ran for Tarrant County judge, he didn’t have to introduce himself to voters. He was elected in 1942 and reelected in 1944 and 1946 but chose not to run for office in 1948. His primary political cause was combatting juvenile delinquency, and he introduced higher educational and professional requirements for county probation officers.

Starting in late 1957 Kraft suffered a series of health problems. First came a stroke, then a bout of pneumonia. Finally, he was stricken with a fatal heart attack on March 25, 1958. He was buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in Fort Worth. Kraft was survived by his wife, as well as their three children, Clarence Jr., Eugenia, and Dorothy. He was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1969 and the Texas League Hall of Fame in 2004. He was also a member of the American Legion, Knights of Pythias, and the Broadway Baptist Church.