SAN ANTONIO — The sounds of the spurs on Travis Darden’s boots showed his excitement to be back on his old stomping grounds, Pittman-Sullivan Park, or as he calls it, “the grass bowl.” 

Darden played baseball games at Pitman Sullivan with the San Antonio Ramblers as part of the South Texas Negro League, a semiprofessional league founded in San Antonio in 1945. 

“It was fun because we would travel. We would go to Uvalde, we would go to Del Rio, and we took one trip where we went and played in Eagle Pass,” Darden said. 

However, Darden endured a lot of racism, especially when he played baseball while in the Air Force. Darden recalled a 1950s game in Mississippi where his team scored 14 runs in the first inning in front of an all-white crowd. 

“They stood up, and they used n-word and said, ‘if you all score any more runs, we will hang all of you,’ so we played defensive baseball,” Darden said. 

They won the game. 

Darden said this was the turmoil all Black baseball players faced back then. 

He says he’s proud now that Major League Baseball is finally recognizing the stats of the Negro League, which many historians believe had better baseball players. 

Caira Spenrath, an archivist at the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum (SAACAM), says it’s been a long time coming.  

“It’s certainly phenomenal. I think there’s a little bit of an idea of like ‘what took them so long? Of course they are phenomenal.’ That’s more of an indictment of, unfortunately, America’s history,” Spenrath said. 

Spenrath says they have been working to document the history of the Negro League as a whole, including the South Texas Negro League. 

SAACAM has Travis Darden’s glove and some signed baseball cards along with artifacts from Negro League legend John “Mule” Miles.  

“We get further and further away from things we consider historic,” Spenrath said. “It’s important now more than ever not just to collect those stories but to preserve them for and share them with future generations to come.” 

Darden says these stories and contributions must be documented across the country — it’s why he makes time to play catch on the grass bowl. 

“We should’ve had a museum a long time ago. Now we have something. That’s what so great about it,” Darden said.