agate type

jack hannibal, arthur coleman, mckinley brewer

This might be among the least-noticed of my work at the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, but I’m personally very happy about being able to identify some minor Indianapolis players from the 1910s.

1) Jack Hannibal was a middleweight boxer who moonlighted as a professional baseball and football player in the 1910s and 1920s.  As I tried to track him down in official records, it soon became clear that “Jack Hannibal” was a boxing pseudonym.  Eventually it turned out that his real name was Porter Lee Floyd.  He was born in Campbellsville, Kentucky, in 1891, and moved to Indianapolis with his parents when he was five.  A high school track star, Floyd first entered the ring professionally in 1912, and he boxed, mostly locally, until 1928.  Supposedly out of 100 fights in his career he lost only five.  As a professional ballplayer he appeared intermittently in the outfield for local Indianapolis teams in the 1910s, appearing under four names: Porter, Lee, Floyd, and Hannibal.  Against the best black professional competition from 1913 to 1916, he batted 28 for 65 in 17 games, .431/.456/.600.  He continued to be active and popular on the local sports scene until his death in 1949 at the early age of 58.  According to the Indianapolis player and journalist Tiny Baldwin, Jack Hannibal was

“a quiet man, who always managed to talk at the right time, and only the right time.  Jack put each player on a high pedestal and made him feel he was on top of the world, and that way gave the players that little extra something which made each give his everything every time he strode onto the diamond.  His famous words were: ‘Every time I get out of Indianapolis, I like Indianapolis that much more’.” (Indianapolis Recorder, August 20, 1955, p. 11)

2)  It was previously thought that Clarence Coleman, a longtime catcher for the Union Giants and other barnstorming teams, also pitched for several Midwestern teams from about 1916 to 1921.  As I compiled stats for the late 1910s and early 1920s, it soon emerged that there must have been two Colemans active at the time: the catcher Clarence, who was a fairly well-known figure, and another Coleman who was a left-handed pitcher.  In 1920, for example, the southpaw Coleman pitched for the Dayton Marcos while Clarence Coleman was catching for the Union Giants.  Julius Culpepper observed the “big south paw” doing mound duty for the Marcos:

“A bird by the name of Coleman was put in to do the hurling…The chap had a strange kind of delivery, the like of which has never been before.  It fooled both the batter and the umpire as well for a while but at least it faded and did not last long” (Chicago Whip, July 24, 1920).

Coleman was only a marginal pitcher, and for a long time I assumed I would never found out anything else about him.  But I recently ran across this letter, printed in Tiny Baldwin’s “Passing Sportinalities” column in the Indianapolis Recorder:

“Mr. Tiney –
    I can’t place you but read your column every week.  Indianapolis is my native home – born on the Southside, raised on the Eastside.  Played with the Marion Ramblers from their start until they disbanded.  Played with Bowser’s or Jewell’s ABC’s after they split from C. I. Taylor, with such players as Todd Allen, Cat Francis, Puggie Hutchinson, George Board, Jack Hannibal, Blackwell, Rogers, Jack Watts and Joe ‘45’ Scotland.
     George Abram and Warner Jewell were managers.  I was a left-handed pitcher.  About Elvis Holland – he used to ask me about holding the ball.  It has been 40 years since I saw him.  He and Paige are about the same age.  I am 60 years old and Holland is younger than I.
     Yours truly –
     Arthur Coleman”
(Indianapolis Recorder, April 12, 1958, p. 14)

“Elvis Holland” is of course the great pitcher, and Indianapolis native, Bill Holland (full name Elvis William Holland), who was Arthur Coleman’s teammate on the 1919 Jewell’s A.B.C.s.

3) A player of a similar vintage, a pitcher/outfielder named Brewer, had been identified in some reference works as “Luther Brewer.”  I concluded that this was a mistake resulting from the omission of a comma in the summary section of a box score in a 1919 issue of the Indianapolis Freeman; Luther Farrell, who went by the name of Al Farrell early in his career, had pitched for the 1919 Jewell’s A.B.C.s alongside Brewer (and Arthur Coleman).  “Luther” and “Brewer” were listed side by side in the box score without a comma between them, and I think it’s possibility that a researcher thought this meant there was someone named “Luther Brewer,” rather than two different players.

Anyway, I was able to confirm this, again via a Tiny Baldwin article, this one from 1955 (see the bottom of the first column):

(Indianapolis Recorder, August 6, 1955, p. 11)

Brewer passed away on September 23, 1955, just six weeks after his words were published in the Recorder.

 

negro leagues database: update

Here’s a recap of the last couple of months at the Seamheads Negro Leagues DB, in case you haven’t been keeping track.  Since November we’ve added:

1) Patrick Rock’s 1923 Negro National League, including Turkey Stearnes’s rookie year, the Monarchs’ first pennant, and 39-year-old Candy Jim Taylor’s bizarre 20-homer season.

2) The little-known Cuban Summer League from 1904 to 1908, plus the Cuban Winter League,1902/03 & 1903/04, which covers quite a bit of great hitting by Julián Castillo and great pitching by Carlos Royer.

3) 1914 & 1915 independent black clubs, which pushes our Negro league coverage back to the dawn of C. I. Taylor’s tenure with the A.B.C.s, and includes some great seasons by his brother Ben Taylor, Cristóbal Torriente, and Dizzy Dismukes.

Plus we’ve made innumerable additions and improvements to the biographical record of players and managers.  This is just me, but I’m especially happy about tracking down some obscure Indianapolis players from the 1910s, such as Jack Hannibal, Arthur Coleman, and McKinley Brewer.   We’ve also gotten significant help from Brian McKenna, who has recently done a series of biographies of early black ballplayers such as Danger Talbert, Doc Sykes, Bingo DeMoss, and Tullie McAdoo.

There hasn’t been a huge amount of commentary about the contents of the Database yet, but Alex King at the Baseball Think Factory’s Hall of Merit has used DB figures to help with his analysis of Cannonball Dick Redding’s pitching and Cyclone Joe Williams’s hitting.

Coming next to the Negro Leagues DB: 1912 & 1913 Negro leagues and 1913/14 & 1914/1915 Cuban leagues.

Also: if anybody can help us get box scores in Atlantic City, Kansas City, or Chicago, it would be greatly appreciated (email me if you’re interested).

juan padrón

Here, courtesy of Brian Campf, is a really nice photograph of Juan Padrón during his tenure with one of the Cuban Stars teams (I would guess eastern).

UPDATE 8:11 am We can confirm that this photograph shows Juan with the eastern Cuban Stars as his cap bears an “NY” logo:

padrón v padrón

Juan Padrón and Luis Padrón

On this blog and elsewhere I’ve put a lot of effort into establishing that Luis Padrón (Cuban right-handed pitcher/infielder/outfielder who played in the minor leagues) and Juan Padrón (Cuban-American lefthanded pitcher who only played in the Negro leagues and Cuba) were different people.  I was even able to find one game (in the 1915/16 Cuban League) in which Juan and Luis faced each other, Juan pitching, Luis playing center field.

I’ve been working on the 1915 Negro leagues for the Seamheads Database.  This was Juan’s rookie season in big-time professional ball.  He started with a Cuban club touring the U.S. called Almendares (not really the Almendares club, just a team using the name).  After he beat the New York Lincoln Stars (featuring John Henry Lloyd, Spot Poles, and Bill Pettus) on July 3, the Lincolns picked him up briefly, before he caught on with Tinti Molina’s western Cuban Stars in August.

During Juan’s time with the Lincoln Stars, he faced another Cuban team, the Long Branch Cubans—who put their veteran outfielder/pitcher Luis Padrón on the mound to face him.  It’s the only instance I’ve found so far of the two Padróns actually pitching against each other.  Luis came out on top, 6 to 2, knocking a triple off Juan for good measure.

Here’s the box score (faded but legible) from the July 14, 1915, Long Branch Record, courtesy of David Skinner:

the pete hill card set has arrived

Gary has got the Pete Hill Card Set fresh from the printer, and they look absolutely fantastic.  He’s also offering a special extra card, featuring Pete in a 1906 Philadelphia Giants “World’s Champions” uniform (the Giants claimed the world baseball championship for 1905), if you order by December 31.

josé méndez in cleveland 1912

Here’s a cool photo of José Méndez I hadn’t seen before, from the August 20, 1912, Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Just another example of how famous Méndez was in the U.S. around that time, surely the best-known ballplayer from outside organized baseball.  Not sure what that round thing growing out of his back is supposed to be.

Incidentally, as the article tells us, the Tellings semipro team was trying to get University of Michigan star George Sisler to pitch against Méndez in the next game.  But the marquee matchup did not come off.  Sisler didn’t show up, and Méndez was “attacked with acute indigestion” just before game time and couldn’t play.  So instead it was Luis “Chicho” González who took the mound and disposed of the Tellings 3 to 1.

pete hill card set

I’ve teamed up with Gary Cieradkowski (of Infinite Baseball Cards fame) and Ron Hill to produce a special set of Pete Hill cards.  We’ve painstakingly researched Pete’s career to create 15 cards that tell his story from his early days with the semipro Pittsburgh Keystones, through his heyday with the powerhouse Philadelphia Giants, Chicago American Giants, and Havana Reds, to his stints as player-manager with the Detroit Stars and Baltimore Black Sox.  We’ve also put together his playing statistics against Negro league, Cuban, and white major league teams.

If you read this blog you know Gary’s art, and you know the care and attention he puts into getting every detail as accurate as possible.   It’s a beautiful set of cards, and in my opinion one of the best things he’s done.  This set is also in a class by itself—I don’t think there has ever been a project focusing on one Negro league player like this.

They’re available for pre-order here—in fact, they ought to be shipping fairly soon, so you should be able to get your set(s) in plenty of time for the holidays.

photos of kuebler’s park, st. louis, ca. 1909

Courtesy of Dwayne Isgrig, here are some photos of Kuebler’s Park, intermittent home of the St. Louis Giants from 1908 through 1915.  Dwayne obtained them from the granddaughter of Henry Kuebler, brother of Conrad Kuebler, financial backer of the Giants through much of this period.

It might be hard to see, but a close examination of the buildings in the background show that this is indeed the same ballpark that appears in this photo from the Indianapolis Freeman.  They also seem to match up with the buildings that line the opposite side of Pope Avenue in the 1908 fire insurance map of St. Louis found by Kevin Johnson.

shadowball

Phil Bradley and Grant Johnson of the 1920 Pittsburgh Stars of Buffalo

In October 1920, with the World Series between the Dodgers and Indians looming, and nobody having thought to invent television in time, the Pittsburgh Stars of Buffalo, a black professional team led by should-be Hall of Famer Grant “Home Run” Johnson, got together with their local arch-rivals, a semipro team called the Polish Nationals, to concoct a rather strange spectacle:

(Buffalo Express, October 1, 1920, p. 14)

PERFECTED SIGNAL SYSTEM
•••
Colored Stars and Polish Nationals to impersonate pennant winners.
•••

    With Pittsburgh Colored Stars and Polish Nationals next Tuesday impersonating Brooklyn and Cleveland in the world’s series opening game, both Grant Johnson and Manager [Ray] Fischer [of the Polish Nationals] last night perfected the signal system which will be used to impart to the players on the field knowledge of the world’s series plays as they come over the telegraph wires, and both local leaders are convinced that actual world’s series duplication can be run off on the Ferry street ball park without a hitch, in other words, that the player impersonating Tris Speaker will triple if Speaker triples and that Sikorski and Hoffman will strike out Phil Bradley if Bradley happens to be impersonating a Brooklynite who has just fanned in the real series.
    Jack Singer will umpire.  Play will start at 3 o’clock in Brooklyn, and if on time there will start on time here.

found: jim jeffries and tom johnson

Jim Jeffries and Tom Johnson

A couple of notes on work related to the Negro Leagues Database.  We’ve put up two recent updates, the first with statistics for the American Series in Cuba from 1904 to 1915, all the exhibition series played in Havana by major league and Negro league teams.  The second update, just last week, included a large amount of new biographical research, much of it having to do with birth and death information, handedness, and player heights and weights.  Here are notes on a couple of the more significant pieces of research included.

1) There’s been a lot of talk (in the comments here and elsewhere) about Jim Jeffries, the A.B.C.s southpaw who won 21 games against Negro league opposition in 1921.  I’ve already talked about his birthplace (Louisville, Kentucky) over at Seamheads.  As part of the new update to the DB, I’ve also been able to establish his time and place of death.  He passed away in Pulaski, Tennessee, on November 28, 1938, his death record still listing his profession as “Baseball Player.”

2) For several years I’ve been looking for Tom Johnson, the American Giants’ righthander who went 14-4 in 1916, 13-2 in 1920, and 46-20 overall in the years we’ve covered so far.  He was the only important American Giants player in these years who had gone completely undetected in any of the official records I’d been able to examine (draft cards, census records, etc.).  I had found a couple of mentions of him as a District of Columbia native, and this letter, from his brother Wilber “Steamboat” Johnson, also a ballplayer, who was serving overseas in the A.E.F. in 1918:

(Chicago Defender, June 15, 1918, p. 12)

(Tom also served in Europe during World War I, drafted into the 365th Pioneer Infantry.)  Wilber’s playing for the Washington, Baltimore, and Belmont Giants seemed to further associate the family with the Baltimore-D.C. area, but that lead went nowhere.  I had Tom’s name and his playing record, but nothing else—no idea how old he was, where he was from, when or where he died.

That’s how it stood for several years, until I recently unearthed his death certificate.  Turns out his full name was Thomas Jefferson Johnson and he was born in Bryan, Texas on April 22, 1889.  He died of tuberculosis in Chicago on September 22, 1926, just 37 years old.  Though he seems to have retired from baseball after the 1921 season, he continued to be involved in the game as an umpire, and his death certificate still listed him as a “Base Ball Player” with the American Giants.