History of baseball in Texas  Like many other states in the United States, Texas has a long history with the game of baseball. The birth of baseball in Texas happened at the same time as the Civil War in 1861 with the formation of the Houston Base Ball Club to promote the game the same way Alexander Cartwright had during the 1840s with the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in Manhattan. Baseball was played in Galveston and other Lone Star State locations prior to the war. The distribution of the game was interrupted by the Civil War but would pick up by the end of the war. Baseball was played during the war mostly by Yankees but occasionally by Confederates. A humorous story by Texas-based Union soldier George A. Putnam told of a baseball game interrupted by Confederate gunfire. Putnam stated:  On April 21, 1868, the first occurrence of a baseball game was taken into account by the "Houston Post". At the San Jacinto Battlegrounds near Houston, where General Sam Houston led Texas to triumph in the War of Independence from Mexico in 1836, a baseball game took place on the anniversary now celebrated as San Jacinto Day. The Houston Stonewalls defeated the Galveston Robert E. Lees, 35–2, that rivaled the result of what originally happened on the same site. Baseball spread throughout the state in the next two decades as a popular amateur game. The influence of what the Houston club had done in the early 1860s, along with those who acquired the nuances of the game from Civil War travels and immigrants who moved to Texas during the Reconstruction Era, helped in organizing the sport and bringing more attention to the game in the state. Scarcely a generation after the state's first recorded game in 1868, Texas fielded 100 minor league clubs—more than any other state. The acceptance of baseball had greatly expanded throughout Texas by the end of the 19th century. Houston Base Ball Club was a founding member of the Texas League in 1888 and also won their first league pennant the next year. The Houston ballclub went by the nicknames of Babies, Red Stockings, Mud Cats, Magnolias, and Wanderers before the Houston Buffaloes name became permanent around the turn of the 20th century. The Texas League helped to make professional baseball popular in the state beginning in the late 19th century. There were teams in Austin, Beaumont, Cleburne, Corsicana, Dallas, Fort Worth, Galveston, Greenville, Houston, Paris, San Antonio, Sherman, Temple, Texarkana, and Waco.