agate type

bruce petway, DH

On July 26, 1913, in a game between the Chicago American Giants and the Cuban Stars in Detroit’s Mack Park, Bruce Petway pinch-hit for starting pitcher Rube Foster in the seventh inning.  Foster, however, returned to pitch the seventh inning, then made way for Dicta Johnson in the eighth—and when the number 9 spot in the lineup came up again in the bottom of the ninth, out came Petway again, this time hitting for Johnson.  Petway singled both times, though his efforts came in vain as the American Giants lost 8 to 5.

The phenomenon of “courtesy runners” in the major leagues as late as the 1950s is well-known, and I’ve seen a number of Negro league examples, too.  But I don’t think I’ve heard about too many “courtesy hitters,” at least before 1973.

(Detroit Free Press, July 27, 1913, p. 18)

cristadoro & escudero, rose hill 1868

In 2010 Brian McKenna posed this question in the comments on a post about Esteban Bellán, the first Cuban major leaguer and a co-founder of the Habana Base Ball Club.  Before becoming a professional, Bellán played for Rose Hill, the baseball club associated with St. John’s College, now Fordham University:

Has anyone ever checked on a college teammate of Stephen Bellan’s named Christadoro (perhaps actually Cristadoro or Cristodoro)?  He was signed/enlisted at the same time Bellan was by the Unions of Morrisania in June 1868.  Don’t know if he played with the club though.

Brian also included a reference to this item from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (June 29, 1868, p.2), listing recent transfers of players from club to club:

A couple of weeks ago John Thorn wrote to clear up the question of Cristadoro’s identity:

A Joseph Cristadoro (also spelled Christadoro), wigmaker, is listed in the NYC Directory of 1839-40; he advertises a hair dye in farflung papers of the late 1860s, though he is based on Maiden Lane in NYC.  A 12-year-old of that name is a student at the “Roman Catholic College” in West Farms (St. John’s, Rose Hill) in 1850.  He was born in New York and may be of Italian descent rather than Spanish.

And a bit later, John was able to confirm his hunch about Cristadoro through the passport application of Cristadoro’s father, born in Palermo in 1813:



John also pointed out that another Rose Hill player from 1868, one “Esendoro,” was more likely to be of Latin American origin:

 

John then steered me to César González Gómez, who figured out several years ago that “Esendero” was really Manuel Escudero, a St. John’s student from Tepic, a city in the state of Nayarit on Mexico’s Pacific coast.  He joins a number of other Mexican students in the U.S. who have been documented playing baseball in the 1860s.  Although César doesn’t yet know for sure, given that Escudero was a teammate of Esteban Bellán, who played a major role in establishing baseball in Cuba, it seems very possible that Escudero played a similar role in bringing baseball to Mexico.

the 42-year-old rookie

Check out my review of Donald Spivey’s new biography of Satchel Paige, If You Were Only White, in the Wall Street Journal.

the negro league career of jim hugh moss

One for Five has documented the story of Jim Hugh Moss, the former Negro leaguer who was executed in Georgia in 1928. Larry Granillo of Baseball Prospectus adds a few details about Eula Thompson’s later life, and highlights how the governor of Georgia used phrenology to determine that he would let Moss’s execution go forward.

I wrote briefly about Moss a few years ago, but you should check out One for Five, Larry, and Brian McKenna for the details of this 1928 media sensation.  Meanwhile, let’s look at the evidence on Jim Hugh Moss and his baseball career.

He was born on June 23, 1897, into a large family headed by a farmer named Robert Moss and his wife Jennie. The family first appears in the 1900 census living in Polk County, Tennessee, with the young James listed as “Hubert” Moss; it’s possible that “Jim Hugh” was a Southern-style nickname for “James Hubert.”  By the 1910 census the family had moved to Etowah in adjacent McMinn County.

By 1918 Jim Moss was married, and by 1920 he and his wife Bertie had 2 children (Frank and Edith), and, while I can’t confirm this, in the comments on Brian’s piece about Moss a researcher refers to the couple’s five children. 

Moss registered for the draft in Etowah in August 1918, and was living there when the 1920 census was taken.  Around this time he worked for the Louisville and Nashville (L & N) Railroad.

None of these particulars (about Moss’s life, his marriage, his children) made it into any newspaper coverage I’ve seen of the Osborne murder, the trials, or the executions.  There’s little about Moss’s character or any personal details about him, other than Eula Thompson’s intriguing description of him as a “negro who talks like a white man,” and the Atlanta Constitution’s account of his demeanor before his execution (see below).

So how do we know that the Jim Hugh Moss who was put to death in Milledgeville, Georgia, on August 3, 1928, was a former Negro league ballplayer?

1) There’s a passage from the Atlanta Constitution from its lengthy article (by a reporter named Whitner Cary) about Moss and Clifford Thompson’s executions, describing Jim Moss in the moments leading up to his death:

Moss chats joyously with newspapermen, flashing his golden smile.  Says he is ready and…reminisces about his batting average.  For this Jim Moss was a great negro ball player a few years back, playing on some of the leading negro teams of the country. Strange to hear a man who is to face death in less than 20 minutes talking about his batting average.  He breaks into the baseball discussion long enough to inquire if his family have made arrangements to have his body sent to Tennessee.  Satisfied on this subject, he lights a cigarette.  The hand that guides the match is as steady as a doctor’s hand about to perform the most delicate of operations.  The man’s nerve is really remarkable. (Atlanta Constitution, August 4, 1928, p. 1)

The Associated Press story on Moss’s execution, reprinted in various forms in many newspapers, says that Moss “played for several seasons with the Chicago Giants, a negro baseball league team.”  The Baltimore Afro-American put the affiliation in its headline:

(Afro-American, August 11, 1928, p. 7)

Aside from the second baseman Bingo DeMoss, who in the early 1910s was occasionally called “Moss” in box scores by mistake, there’s a single example of a player named “Moss” appearing for one of Chicago’s major black professional teams during this era.  This occurred on Sunday, May 19, 1918. 

Rube Foster found himself in a curious bind that day.  A complicated set of circumstances found him obliged to play games in both Peoria and Chicago on the same day, so he was forced to split his squad.  In Chicago, to face the white semipro West Ends, he only had four regular players and one pitcher available.  He had to switch catcher Bruce Petway to center field and outfielder Pete Hill to third base, plug himself in at first (though he rarely played anymore), and bring in the old pitcher Charles Dougherty (who had retired several years before) to play right field.  He also recruited a completely unknown battery consisting of pitcher Moss and catcher Arbuckle (no first names given). 

How did Moss do? The Chicago Defender published a complete, batter-by-batter account of the game, so that part’s easy.  In four innings he gave up only 3 hits, but he walked five, hit two, balked, and threw the ball into center field.  After his fourth and final inning, the Giants trailed 5 to 3, although they rallied to tie the game in the bottom of the inning as Frank Wickware pinch-hit for Moss.  Wickware then gave up three more runs, so Moss wasn’t on the hook for the eventual 8 to 6 loss, but he had failed the test.  His four innings versus the West Ends is the totality of his career in the Negro league big time.  (A full account of the game, the box score, and an article about Foster’s scheduling issues can be found in the Defender, May 25, 1918, p. 9.)

After that the next time we find “Moss” playing in Chicago is the following season, 1919, when he turns up pitching and playing center field for a minor team called the Havana Stars.  Founded as the “Fast Havana Stars” in 1911, this was mostly a traveling club that barnstormed through the Midwest and didn’t receive a great deal of publicity.  (There was no actual Cuban connection, and no Cuban players.) Sam Crawford captained the team in 1917,  the same year they hired a female first baseman named Pearl Barrett.

(Chicago Defender, April 19, 1919, p. 11.)

In 1920 Moss disappears from the Chicago scene, but another Moss appears as a pitcher/outfielder for the Montgomery Grey Sox of the Negro Southern League.  In fact, in a late September game against the Chicago American Giants, who were touring the South after wrapping up the first NNL pennant, Moss made a crucial error that let in three runs and handed the game to the Giants (his former team, assuming he’s the same person who played in Chicago in 1918 and 1919).

 

(Montgomery Advertiser, September 26, 1920, p. 9)

This Moss moved to the Bessemer (Ala.) Giants in 1921, then returned to Montgomery for the 1922 season, where one of his teammates was the young Turkey Stearnes.  After that I lose track of him.  I have (so far) found no direct statement that Moss of the Negro Southern League, 1920-1922, was the same as Moss of the American Giants and Havana Stars, 1918-1919, but both were pitcher/outfielders, and there doesn’t seem to be any overlap.  I’d rate it as quite likely they were the same person.

On the other hand, Jim Hugh Moss is (relatively) well-attested in what records I have easy access to, and there’s no link to Chicago in them (or Montgomery or Bessemer, Alabama, for that matter).  He registered for the draft in McMinn County, Tennessee, in August 1918, in between the American Giants/West Ends game in May 1918 and the appearance of “Captain Moss” with the Havana Stars in spring 1919.  In the 1920 census, enumerated in January, he appears in McMinn County, living with his wife and children.  In both documents he is listed as a railroad employee, not a baseball player. 

None of this, however, is inconsistent with Moss going to Chicago in 1918 to try out for the American Giants, failing and returning home, then trying again in Chicago in 1919, and spending the next few summers in the Negro Southern League.  The case is to some degree circumstantial, but at the very, very least we can say this: if Jim Hugh Moss did have a Negro league career, this was it—there aren’t any other possibilities.

One more small issue.  The AP story on his execution comments that “Moss, a trained athlete and a giant in stature, played for several seasons with the Chicago Giants, a negro baseball league team” (Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, August 4, 1928, p. 2).  His World War I card, however, lists Jim Hugh Moss as “medium” in height and build, and the detailed Atlanta Constitution story about his execution makes no mention of Moss being particularly imposing (and the way it’s written, I’d think it would).

Incidentally, Jim Hugh Moss almost certainly knew Walter Claude “Steel Arm” Dickey, the St. Louis Stars pitcher who was murdered in Etowah, Tennessee, Moss’s hometown, in 1923.  Dickey was from northern Georgia, but lived in Etowah, and both were apparently involved in running liquor (Dickey’s murder was murkily associated in bootlegging).  And of course Dickey also pitched in the Negro Southern League from 1920 to 1922, including a season with the Montgomery Gray Sox (though not at the same time as Moss).  Dickey pitched for the Knoxville Giants in 1920 and 1922, and for Montgomery in 1921.

Larry Granillo, in the comments to his post on Moss, added this: “I would love to know that we can verify at least one fact about his career.  It just goes to show how hard Negro Leagues info is to come by and just how great it is to even have the data that we have, incomplete as it is.”

In fact, I think Moss’s case demonstrates the exact opposite of what Larry’s saying here.  Keep in mind that as a baseball player he was an extremely marginal figure, essentially the equivalent of someone who pitched part of a spring training game and then spent a few seasons in the minors.  The Negro leagues were not some vast impenetrable mystery.  It’s often possible, even with limited resources, to dig up quite a bit of information, even about minor players like Moss.

sprudel park

A while back I called the Catholic Protectory Oval, the Bronx home of the New York Lincoln Giants, “one of the most remarkable settings for Negro league baseball.”  Now I’d like to introduce what’s unquestionably the most remarkable setting for Negro league baseball: Sprudel Park in West Baden Springs, Indiana, birthplace of Larry Bird and home of the West Baden Sprudels in the 1900s and 1910s.

The Sprudels were organized and run by black employees of the palatial West Baden Springs Hotel, which boasted of the largest free-standing dome in the world, and advertised itself as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

Both the Baden hotel and its great rival in the adjacent community of French Lick existed because of the mineral springs of the region, and both hotels marketed brands of mineral water—the West Baden hotel called its brand “Sprudel Water,” while French Lick sold the eventually much more famous “Pluto Water.”  The hotels’ black professional baseball teams named themselves after the mineral water brands.  By 1910 both clubs had gotten pretty serious—the Sprudels had hired Charles Isham Taylor, famous manager of the Birmingham Giants, to run the club, and he brought along his ballplaying brothers, including eventual Hall of Famer Ben Taylor.  The Plutos, meanwhile, had built their own ballpark, Pluto Baseball Park (more on this another time).

The Sprudels had no need to build a park, because a venue already existed.  The Indianapolis Freeman described it in 1911:  “The park is the prettiest in the West and very much different from all other ball parks, the fans having an opportunity to see the games from an elevated bicycle track, fifteen feet high” (March 18, 1911, p. 7).  This does not quite capture the reality of the park, as you can see from this 1911 postcard:

And here’s an amazing aerial view on another postcard, this one from John Martin Smith’s book of photographs and postcards, French Lick and West Baden Springs:

There’s also a Sanborn fire insurance map from 1913, which unfortunately cuts off in the middle of the velodrome/baseball park:

And here, also from Smith’s book, is a look at the upper level of the bicycle track, where fans could sit in deck chairs and watch C. I. Taylor’s Sprudels, or the major league clubs that took spring training here.

The odd shape, the bicycle track/grandstand with vacationers looking on from their deck chairs, the tennis courts in center field, the hotel’s great dome, possibly visible over the top of the structure if you looked back toward home plate, the ambience of the surrounding gardens…all of this combined to make the West Baden Base Ball Park, or Sprudel Park as it was usually called by the newspapers reporting on games, one of the weirdest settings for professional baseball you can imagine.

The Sprudels and Plutos began to fade away as baseball powers in the mid-1910s, and Sprudel Park burnt down in 1928.  But today, to judge from Google Maps, it looks like a baseball field of some sort, with a backstop and outfield fence, lies directly on the former site of Sprudel Park.  Even though the angles are a little different and the course of the creek seems to have been altered since 1913, you can orient yourself by the gray cross of the little bridge and walkway across the creek, which remains.

not in living color

I’ve talked about Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper before.  In it Baker chronicles the destructive effects of the move from paper to microfilm, in which we lost more information than we will probably ever know.  (He should probably write an update about the move to digitization; this had hardly gotten underway when Double Fold was published in 2001.)

Anyway, here is a relatively minor example of what he was talking about.  Behold the St. Louis Globe-Democrat’s Sunday “Color Sport Supplement,” September 12, 1915, featuring youngster George Sisler depicted in all of nature’s sumptuous hues…or not:



No idea whether it looked that great or not in its original color.  But it would be nice to know!

the first african american players on baseball cards

Nit-picking time.  This fine article about the lefthanded pitcher Jimmy Claxton, the mixed-race native of British Columbia who managed to sneak across the color line briefly with the Oakland Oaks in 1916 by passing as Indian, says that Claxton was the “first black man on a baseball card” (a claim echoed in the B-R Bullpen).  Tom Hawthorn’s brief SABR biography of Claxton calls him “the first African-American baseball player to be depicted on a baseball card.”  Claxton’s brief time with the Oaks coincided with the Zeenut candy company’s schedule for putting together its PCL card set that spring, and so he wound up on this now (relatively) famous card:




But I think this claim ought to be adjusted to read, “first African-American player on an American baseball card.”  Because the first black men on baseball cards were in the Cabañas card set of 1909, printed in Cuba to commemorate the Detroit Tigers’ visit to Havana that fall, and two of them were Americans: Pete Hill and Bruce Petway.

Then a year later Punch Cigarros put out a set of cards that included, in addition to the many players of Afro-Cuban heritage, Hill and Petway again, along with John Henry Lloyd and possibly Grant Johnson (though this last one is unconfirmed; evidently no examples have been found).

 
All these predate the Zeenut Claxton card, though that still gets priority among American baseball cards.

Also, check out my friend Gary Cieradkowski’s Jimmy Claxton card.  And, of course, our amazing Pete Hill Card Set!

rube vs. rube

“It was during this period [the early 1900s] that the nickname ‘Rube’ was attached to the young pitcher.  Legend has it that his teammates began calling him Rube after he defeated George E. (Rube) Waddell and the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-2, in a game in New York.”
    --Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White (1970), p. 107.

“By his own recollection, that’s the year [1902) he met and whipped the great Rube Waddell, who was 25-7 with the pennant-winning Athletics.  Other reports say the Waddell game was in 1903 or 1905.  No box score has yet been found.  However, since there was no Sunday baseball in those years, the Athletics were in the habit of playing exhibitions outside the city every Sunday, and it is not unlikely that they played Rube’s club on one or more of those occasions.”
    --John Holway, Blackball Stars (1988), p. 11.

“As a raw-talent rookie pitcher soon after the turn of the century, the big Texan was credited with 51 victories in 1902, including a win over the great Rube Waddell, the game in which Foster received his nickname.”
    --James Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (1994), p. 290.

“One postseason contest against the Athletics saw Foster go head-to-head against Connie Mack’s star southpaw, Rube Waddell.  Foster won 5-2, and as a consequence, he later recalled, ‘they gave me the name of the colored Rube Waddell’.  News accounts, starting in 1905, first began referring to the Philadelphia Giants’ ace as Rube Foster.”
    --Robert Cottrell, The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant (2001), p. 19.

 

Andrew Foster, it is said, acquired his nickname on the field of battle, defeating Rube Waddell and taking it from him in what sounds like some kind of ancient warrior ritual. As far as I can tell, nobody has identified the actual exhibition game against the Philadelphia Athletics, and accounts vary considerably about the year in which the legendary contest occurred, anywhere from 1902 to 1905.

I haven’t been able to find the game against the A’s either, though I wouldn’t rule it out (see Holway’s comment above).  The earliest example I’ve found of Foster himself telling the story of his nickname appears in an article by Frederick North Shorey in the September 14, 1907, issue of the Indianapolis Freeman.  Shorey quotes Foster saying, in part:

The order of the sentences kind of implies it took place in 1905, though I’d say it’s still more than a little ambiguous.  Phil Dixon doesn’t record any exhibition games between Waddell’s A’s and Foster’s Philadelphia Giants in his thorough account of the Giants’ 1905 season, though there are lots of blank spaces in October, and again, I wouldn’t rule it out. 

But Foster was called “Rube” before 1905.  The earliest example I’ve found so far is from the July 26, 1904, issue of the Trenton Evening Times, in a story about a game between the Philadelphia Giants and the Trenton YMCA:

So perhaps it took place earlier in 1904, or possibly in 1902 or 1903.  In 1902, Foster played for the Chicago Union Giants and a white semipro team in Otsego, Michigan; so far, I haven’t found any indication that either of these teams ever faced Rube Waddell, though my search has hardly been exhaustive.  In 1903 Foster joined the Cuban X Giants on the east coast.  I haven’t found them playing the Philadelphia A’s yet, but there is this, from July 28, 1903:

(New York Evening World, July 28, 1903, p. 8)

The Murray Hills were a fairly prominent Manhattan semipro team managed at the time by Nat Strong.  And the following Sunday (August 2) they did indeed meet the Cuban X Giants at Olympia Field (see below), with Foster on the mound for the Giants, vs. “Wilson” for the Murray Hills.

(New York Sun, August 3, 1903, p. 6)

It happens that Charles Dryden of the Philadelphia North American, one of the most famous baseball writers in the country, wrote up an account of this game.  I haven’t seen the original, but a passage from it was quoted a couple of days later in the Pittsburg Press:

(Pittsburg Press, August 5, 1903, p. 10)

The Philadelphia Athletics were in town to play the Highlanders, but at that time Sunday baseball was illegal in New York, so Waddell spent the enforced day off pitching as “Wilson” for the semipro Murray Hills in an illicit game (although results were still reported in some newspapers) against Andrew Foster of the Cuban X Giants.  Waddell struck out 12 but was dinged for 11 or 12 hits, while Foster scattered 7 hits and won, 6 to 3.  At one point Foster hit Waddell in the head, to the apparent entertainment of the crowd.  Later a foul tip from Waddell supposedly hit a fan and ignited a box of matches in his pocket, setting his clothes on fire.

On the top of that, this game appears to be the only documented instance of Foster pitching against Waddell.  Even though it was against the Murray Hills and not the Athletics, and the score was 6 to 3 and not 5 to 2, it seems to me quite possible that this was the game that led to Foster being forever after known as Rube.

Some closing notes:

• I still think it’s not unlikely that Foster was really called Rube because he was a new arrival in the North from rural Texas, and that the story that it came from his victory over Waddell is a case of retconning.

• You’d think that Nat Strong and the Murray Hills would have wanted it known widely that Waddell was pitching for them that Sunday.  This would be complicated by the blue laws, obviously, and by the fact that Connie Mack would probably have frowned on his star pitcher throwing nine innings on his off day.  So I’m wondering what kind of guerrilla marketing techniques Nat Strong used to evade detection by the authorities but still pull in a good crowd.

• The address given for Olympia Field (135th St. and Lenox Avenue) was only a long block away from the address later commonly given for Olympic Field (136th St. and Fifth Avenue), eventually the home of the New York Lincoln Giants.  I don’t know if they were really the same ballpark, or related in some way.

pete hill, 1910 punch cigar cards

Over at Cubanball.com they have posted a new version of the Pete Hill card from the 1910 Punch Cigarros set, commemorating the fall 1910 American Series.  The old version I had posted here was damaged and actually didn’t look quite like Hill; here you can see more clearly that it is, in fact, him:

UPDATE 11:20 pm Here is an even clearer (though smaller) image, from an auction at Hake’s - where it sold for nearly $65,000 last fall.

rogelio valdés at bat, atlantic city 1905

Here’s an extreme rarity—an action photo of a game involving a black baseball team, published in a mainstream newspaper in 1905.  It shows Rogelio Valdés of the Cuban X Giants batting against the Atlantic City club at Inlet Park in early July.  Assuming the image hasn’t been reversed, this would mean that Valdés, a right-handed batter according to Jorge Figueredo, actually hit left-handed, or at least switch-hit.

(Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1905, p. 13)