MORRIS, JERRY WALTER (1880-1961). Jerry Walter Morris,
baseball player, promoter, and executive, was born on January 30,
1880, at Rockwall, Texas. He left the University of Texas in 1902 to
play with Corsicana of the Texas League,qv
a league in which he spent the next twenty-six years as player,
manager, club executive, and, for five years, league president. He
was one of the earliest collegians to leap directly into organized
baseball. Headlines and records seemed to follow Morris. In his
first season at Corsicana his club had baseball's highest winning
percentage (.793), set a world record for consecutive victories
(twenty-seven), never relieved a pitcher all season, and figured in
the game's greatest slaughter-a 51-3 victory over Texarkana. All
this was done with an eleven-man squad. While a student at the
University of Texas, where he frequently played without shoes,
Morris had been known as the "Barefoot Boy at Texas." He received a
law degree from the University of Texas in 1906 and tried to combine
law and baseball careers until 1910, when he decided that baseball
was his life's work. In 1916 he became president of the Texas League
and helped to arrange the Dixie Series, a thirty-seven-year match
between the Texas League and the Southern Association champions. For
several years he owned half interest in the Fort Worth Cats, and
again, after 1922, he was part owner and secretary-business manager
for six years of the Dallas baseball team. He also served as
business manager for the Shreveport, Tyler, and Fort Worth teams. He
held the following personal records: club manager in his third year
of organized baseball; organizer of more leagues (fourteen) and
president of more (seven) than any other man on record; at one time
president of three leagues concurrently-the East Texas, Evangeline,
and Cotton States; builder of nine baseball parks; developer of
numerous baseball players for the major leagues, including Rogers
Hornsby;qv and once, in an
emergency, Texas League president and umpire simultaneously. He died
on August 2, 1961, of a heart attack following a surgical operation.
In December 1966 he was elected to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame.qv
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center,
University of Texas at Austin.
Joe B. Frantz
"MORRIS, JERRY WALTER." The Handbook of Texas Online.
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/MM/fmo58.html
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