Joe Pate: Fort Worth Panthers Pitcher and Texas League Icon (1892–1948)

Joseph William Pate, the ace of the Fort Worth Panthers’ pitching staff during the 1920s, was born in the South Texas town of Alice on June 6, 1892. He moved with his parents, Mary Effie (Edelbrock) Pate and William Wesley Pate, to Fort Worth when he was around three years old. He played football and baseball at Central (later Paschal) High School, from which he graduated in 1911, and was sporadically enrolled at Tulane University until 1919. In 1911 he returned to South Texas after signing a contract with the Corpus Christi Pelicans of the Class D Southwest Texas League.

A stocky, 5’10”, left-handed pitcher, “Bugs” Pate began his professional career with a record of 0–2 in six games with Corpus Christi. Working his way up the minor league ladder, he logged time in Dallas; Texarkana (where he was 23–10 in 1913); Charleston, South Carolina; Wichita, Kansas; and Paris, Texas. Pate briefly played for the Fort Worth Panthers, his hometown team, as part of an option agreement with Texarkana in 1914, before being signed by team secretary (the equivalent of a general manager), Paul LaGrave, for the 1918 season. However, World War I intervened. Drafted in April 1918, Pate was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s artillery branch later that year. 

Returning for one game with the Panthers in June, he finished the season with a record of 2–2. Pate remained with the Panthers for the majority of his remaining baseball career. In the itinerant world of the professional baseball player, such continuity was not guaranteed, even for the highly proficient. In 1919, his first full season with the team, Pate’s record was 15–4 with an earned run average (ERA) of 1.64, one of the lowest in the Texas League.

In 1919 the Fort Worth Panthers were on the brink of becoming a Texas League powerhouse and one of the most renowned minor league teams of all time. After losing the Texas League championship to the Shreveport Gassers in 1919, the Panthers won six consecutive titles from 1920 through 1925. During that span they won 100 or more games every year save 1923 (ninety-six wins) and prevailed in the post-season Dixie Series against the Southern Association champion five times—they lost to the Mobile Bears in 1922. In both 1922 and 1924 the Panthers won 109 games, still a Texas League season record.

The 1924 season was arguably the apogee of the dynasty. The second-place team, the Houston Buffaloes, finished 30½ games behind. As a post-season reward for Pate’s thirty victories, Fort Worth booster Amon Carter, a minority owner of the Panthers, took him and slugger Clarence “Big Boy” Kraft to Washington, D.C., where they not only watched the World Series match-up between the Washington Senators and the New York Giants, they met President Calvin Coolidge.

From 1919 through 1925 Pate won 168 games (he averaged twenty-four wins per year). In addition to achieving four twenty-win seasons, he is the only Texas League pitcher to register two thirty-win seasons. During this run Pate toiled more than 300 innings every year except one (1919). He was part of a devastating pitching duo, as right-hander Paul Wachtel won 160 games during that same period. In both 1920 and 1921 the Panthers had four twenty-game winners, a rarity that has happened only twice (the 1920 Chicago White Sox and the 1971 Baltimore Orioles) in the major leagues. The Panthers’ title run came to an end in 1926, and one reason might have been the departure of Joe Pate.

 Although Pate had been offered major league contracts before, he chose to remain in Fort Worth until 1926, when, at the age of thirty-three, he became a major league rookie. He was drafted by Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, a team on the rise after a decade of doldrums. The A’s, after winning six pennants from 1902 through 1914, sank to last place for seven consecutive seasons. By 1925 the A’s had become contenders again, and Pate chose to sign with them. They would win three straight pennants starting in 1929, but by then Pate was back in the minors.

In 1926 Pate went 9–0 with a 2.71 ERA. While he had been a starting pitcher in Fort Worth, Pate was primarily a reliever (just two starts in forty-seven appearances) with the A’s. His undefeated status extended until June 30, 1927, when the Washington Senators finally tagged him with a loss. He had appeared in seventy games without a loss, a record at the time. Pate’s 1927 season was disappointing, so he was released in July and returned to the Panthers, who had moved to a new ballpark, also known as Panther Field (and later as LaGrave Field), several blocks east of their old North Side park.

Pate went 6–3 with a 2.07 ERA in just sixty-one innings for the Panthers in 1927, but in 1928 he began to show signs of wear. Increasingly used in relief, he compiled a record of 11–8 with a 3.72 ERA before being sent to the Minneapolis Millers of the Double A American Association in August. He remained with Minneapolis the following season and spent the final three years of his career pitching in Birmingham; El Paso; Shreveport; York, Pennsylvania; and Allentown, Pennsylvania. When Pate was released by Allentown in 1932, days before his fortieth birthday, his composite minor league record was 255 wins and 133 losses. In addition, he had a 10-4 record during the post-season Dixie Series. 

Pate chose to remain in the game for nine years as an umpire, mostly in the Texas League. Later he opened a newsstand and domino parlor in downtown Fort Worth. 

Late in 1948 Pate came down with influenza but did not seek medical attention. After spending Christmas Day at home, he died at the age of fifty-six of a heart attack in his sleep on December 26, 1948. He was survived by his wife, Clara Mary (Holden) Pate, whom he had married on October 11, 1920, and their daughter, Mary Louise. Pate’s obituary ran on the front page of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, twenty years after he threw his last pitch for the Panthers. 

He was interred at Oakwood Cemetery, a short distance from the ballparks where he had achieved fame. He was posthumously inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1972 and into the Texas League Hall of Fame in 2004.