Born in San Marcos, Texas, Sporting Life magazine once described Compton as "a good-natured, easy-going Texan". Unsurprisingly, he is the only player in MLB history with the real first name of "Anna". (As well as "Pete", Compton would also use the name "Bash", a shortened form of his middle name, and quite fitting for a baseball player.) After three seasons in the minors (beginning as a 19-year-old in 1909), Compton hit .352 for Battle Creek, Michigan based Battle Creek Crickets in the Class C Southern Michigan League; that earned him a ticket to the St. Louis Browns, where he hit .271 in 28 games.
Compton spent all of 1912 in St. Louis, splitting time in left and right field and also logging 34 games as a pinch hitter. Compton could hit -- he had a solid .280 average that year -- but his defense was questionable, committing nine errors in left field, fourth-worst in the AL despite spending only 49 games there. (That season, Compton also became a part of a strange quirk of the record books: one of his pinch-hit appearances was credited to a nonexistent player named "Lou Proctor", and thus Proctor was listed in the encyclopedias until the 1960s. According to legend, the real Lou Proctor was a telegraph operator who inserted his own name into the box score.)
After spending the next three seasons bouncing up and down between the Browns and their top minor league team in Kansas City, Compton went across town and jumped to the St. Louis Terriers of the Federal League. After playing just two games with the Terriers (both ends of a doubleheader on July 24), an injunction forced Compton to return to Kansas City; he was then was sold to the Boston Braves in August, remaining there for the rest of the 1915 season. The following year, the Braves sold Compton to the Pittsburgh Pirates in July, only to have Pete return to Boston eleven days later; he hit just .184 in the big leagues, but managed a .291 mark for Louisville. (This would be Compton's biggest impediment to becoming a major league star: he could produce in the minors (.307 career average) but not in the majors (.241), making him someone who would now be called an AAAA player.) After spending the entire 1917 season in the minors, Louisville sold Compton to the New York Giants in 1918, where he hit just .217 in 21 games; this would be his final big-league stop.

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