Hooker Baseball Cabinet Card, 1904

Oklahoma Baseball. Anon. Below photo it is titled 1904 Hooker, Okla. In the outdoor photograph, eight men are in uniforms with "Hooker BBA'' on them; another man's uniform front reads, "Manager HBBA"; and still another's uniform reads, "Captain HBBA". Two other men are out of uniform, and a young bat boy holding a catcher's mitt is sitting cross-legged off in the lower left corner of the photo. The team is posed with five uniformed men standing behind five others on the ground. The usual pyramid of bats and an assortment of gloves and a ball are visible in the photograph. The Manager is identified with the initials "J. J.M.", and the Captain is identified with the initials "C. M." The town of Hooker, in Texas County, OK, was founded circa 1904 by the Chicago Townsite Company two years after the railroad came through the Oklahoma Panhandle area. If the scrawled ink date of 1904 beneath the image is correct, the Hooker Base Ball team (we assume that is what HBB stood for) was photographed on a field right at the beginning of the townsite's development.