agate type

bill jackman, houston black buffaloes, 1921

Nearly a year ago I posted what might have been (then) the earliest known mention of Bill Jackman in a baseball context, as a Houston pitcher brought north to play for the semi-pro St. Louis Tigers in 1922.

Bill Mullins (as he pointed out in the comments to the St. Louis Tigers post) has found at least two earlier references to Jackman as a pitcher for the Houston Black Buffaloes of the Texas Colored League in 1921.

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 26, 1921)

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 6, 1921)

Of the Houston players Thomas Calloway, William Hines, Lawson Perry, and Jackman would all come north to join the St. Louis Tigers in 1922, as would Thomas Gee of Fort Worth, while Houston third baseman Lunie Danage played for the St. Louis Giants in 1920.  “Bailey” of Fort Worth might be Bob Bailey, who would be in Philadelphia by late April 1921 trying to wrest the second base position from Bunny Downs, while “Jones” might be Ruben Jones of several later NNL teams.  “Steel Arm Johnnie” Harris was pitching for the Brooklyn Royal Giants by May.  Harris later joined the Lincoln Giants, and was badly hurt in a train accident involving the team in 1922.  His injuries may have put an end to his career (though I am not certain).

the lawson brothers

  

If you have a chance, pick up Jerry Kuntz’s seriously fascinating new book about the Lawson brothers—Alfred Lawson, who was (briefly) a major league pitcher, a baseball promoter who organized outlaw minor leagues and barnstorming tours of Cuba, an important figure in early aviation, and founder of his own religion, called “Lawsonomy”; and his younger brother George, a.k.a. “Andy,” a con man, vaudeville manager, and anti-Klan activist who tried to organize the racially-integrated Continental League in 1921.

Alfred, incidentally, founded the 1907 outlaw Atlantic League, whose Brooklyn club featured Luis Padrón, Emilio Palomino, Andrés Ortega, and Tinti Molina.

chester base ball ground, 1898

In the comments to my post on Cuban X Giant Ed Wilson’s three home runs off future major leaguer Stoney McGlynn in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1902, I remarked that “at least two of Wilson’s were over-the-fence home runs, though who knows how big the Chester park was.”

Well, Bill Mullins found an 1898 Sanford fire insurance map of Chester that shows the ballpark.  It’s pretty definitely the same park, as it’s on 12th Street, and the Chester Times called it “Twelfth Street Park” in 1902.  While there’s no indication of where the fences were (and no guarantee that the park hadn’t been altered since 1898), this might give us some hint about its dimensions.  Going by the scale at the bottom, and granting some space between the grand stand and home plate, it looks like the right field fence would have been quite close (certainly much less than 300 feet down the line) while left field was substantially farther out, and center field was potentially quite spacious (relatively speaking, anyway).

So, where did Wilson hit his home runs in 1902?  Here are his four plate appearances:

In the second inning, “Wilson led off with a home run over the right wire…”

In the third inning, “Wilson repeated the trick and lined the ball over the centre field fence after two men were out and the umpire had called two strikes on him.”

In the fifth he struck out.

And in the eighth he homered again to help seal the game, but no details are given.

I don’t have any idea whether Wilson hit left or right-handed (or was a switch-hitter), and again we don’t know where the fences were exactly, especially in center field.  But right field was probably quite close, and the mention of “the wire” indicates that there might have been a high fence or barrier there to compensate for the short distance.

smoky city

I’ve been scouring the Historic Pittsburgh site for photographic evidence of Central Baseball Park and Ammon Field, hoping to find an outfield wall or a grandstand appearing in the distance over somebody’s shoulder or something.  No such luck, but there is quite a bit of imagery that conveys the atmosphere of the Hill District during (and around) the 1920s, the decade of the Pittsburgh Keystones, Alexander Williams’s brief career as a baseball magnate, and the Homestead Grays’ ascent to the status of Pittsburgh’s premier black baseball team.  These photos were all taken by the Pittsburgh City Photographer.

Here is a 1912 photo of Wylie Avenue looking east:

 

The southwest corner of Wylie and Kirkpatrick in 1927, just a couple of blocks south of the current location of Josh Gibson Field:

A 1930 photo of 2135 Wylie Avenue, just three longish blocks west of the Keystones’ Central Baseball Park (which may well not have existed by then), looking west:

A 1931 photo of a grocery at 2630 Wylie.  Central Park would have been two to three blocks west (to the right), and the future location of Greenlee Field would have been two blocks to the north (behind the photographer):

Here is a pair of 1930 photographs showing 1213 Wylie Avenue, a number of blocks west of the area where the Negro League ballparks were located.  The first is looking west, the second looking east:

This is 803 Wylie Avenue in 1931:

Next is a gas station that existed in 1930 at the corner of Centre Avenue, just south of the old Central Park location.  The caption locates the station at 2352 Centre Avenue, which would have put it on the north side of the street, and we would be looking east.  That would mean Central Park would have been not very far behind the service station, somewhere to the left beyond the trees:

The corner of Tomahawk and Shafer streets looking south to Bedford Avenue (see the map in this post for the location).  Today’s Ammon Playground stands on this spot, with Josh Gibson Field itself a few yards behind where the photographer was standing:

NOTE: I found these images several weeks ago; just yesterday Historic Pittsburgh added 2,000 more images from the Pittsburgh City Photographer, which I haven’t looked at yet.

black baseball in the 19th century

While on the subject of black/white games in the late 1860s, I should mention one of the most fascinating recent baseball books I’ve picked up: The Early Image of Black Baseball by James Brunson (who comments here on occasion).  James includes a lavish selection of illustrations from nineteenth-century publications and quite detailed accounts of the early African American baseball scene in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Chicago. 

Along with Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball and Michael Lomax’s Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860-1901, this makes, I believe, a grand total of three books about nineteenth-century African American baseball.

olympics/alerts 1869: consequences

Bill Mullins comments about the Olympics/Alerts contest in 1869 that “apparently there were some repercussions for the Olympics for having played a black team.”  Bill quotes a September 22, 1869, article in the Washington, D.C., Daily National Intelligencer and Washington Express):

It is currently reported in base ball circles that the Maryland Base-ball Club of Baltimore, have passed a resolution declining to play their return game with the Olympics of this city.  Their action is based upon the fact of the latter club playing a match game with the Alert Base-ball Club (colored) of this city, which is not a convention club.

Of course, the Olympics went on to play the colored Mutuals club on October 12, so they did not give in right away.  But it seems (consulting the list given by James Brunson in the comments) there are so far no traces of top-level white clubs in D.C. playing their black counterparts until 1878, when the Nationals played the Manhattans, and 1879 when they took on the Mutuals.  So it’s possible that the Olympics’ experience in 1869 caused them (and other clubs) to shy away from again testing the color line, at least for a few more years. 

the strat-o-matic negro league set

...will be available soon.  Here is a list of the players to be included.

josh gibson documentary

This new documentary about Josh Gibson (apparently the first film specifically about him) looks interesting, especially as it focuses on the possible effects of his brain tumor. (Thanks to Fredrico.)

washington olympics vs. washington alerts & mutuals, 1869

On September 3, 1869, the Olympic Club of Philadelphia (which dated back to 1832) played a match against the Pythian Club, led by Octavius Catto; the Olympics won, 44 to 23.  This marks, as far as I know, the earliest match game between white and black organized clubs.  A couple of weeks later (September 16) the Pythians defeated the City Items, a minor, newspaper-sponsored club, 27 to 17, marking the first victory by a black club over a white one.  The Pythians, as I understand it, attempted to schedule a game against the Athletics, the best team in Philadelphia and one of the very best in the country, but the challenge was never accepted.

Very shortly after these pioneering interracial clashes, another pair of matches occurred that may be even more significant.  Possibly inspired by happenings in Philadelphia, the Alert Club of Washington, D.C., issued a challenge to the Washington Olympics, at that time one of a dozen or so openly professional teams in the country and (along with the Nationals) one of the two leading clubs in Washington—and their challenge was accepted.

(“Letters from Washington,” Baltimore Sun, September 17, 1869)

Reports of the game, played on September 20, 1869, made their way into the Washington dispatches of a number of northeastern newspapers.  I haven’t found a box score, but the Washington Star reported the lineups:

(Washington Star, September 20, 1869)

The Olympics featured a number of familiar names, including Davy Force and eventual National League president Nick Young.  The figure most associated with the black baseball scene in D.C. at the time, Frederick Douglass’s son Charles, doesn’t appear among the Alerts’ players, and may by that time have moved to the city’s other important black club, the Mutuals.

The game didn’t go well for the Alerts on the field, but the event drew a big crowd, and was generally interpreted as a positive development:

(New York Tribune, September 21, 1869)

(Washington Star, September 21, 1869)

(New York Herald, September 21, 1869)

About three weeks later, on October 12, the Olympics played another match against a black team, the Mutual Club.  This time the time the result was much closer:

(Washington Star, October 13, 1869)

I haven’t been able to find any box scores or any other mentions of the Mutuals/Olympics game so far.  Nor have I found any evidence that competition between white and black clubs in D.C. continued into the 1870s, although the Mutuals were active for a number of years after this.  Still, this means we can trace contests between the top levels of the black and white baseball worlds all the way back to 1869, which is considerably earlier than is usually understood.

Incidentally, the scores for both the Olympics/Alerts game and the Olympics/Mutuals game are reported by Marshall Wright in his book, The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870.  He makes no special note of them, however, while mentioning the Pythians’ game against the City Items, so I’m guessing that he didn’t realize they were matches against African American clubs.

UPDATE 5:14 p.m.  Charles Douglass had indeed moved on to the Mutual Base Ball Club by September 1869; among the Pythians’ papers is a letter dated September 10, 1869, from Douglass in his capacity as the Mutuals’ corresponding secretary, proposing that the Pythians and Mutuals play a series in Washington.

UPDATE 10/17/2009 I should have remembered that Randall Brown mentioned the Olympics’ 1869 matches against both the Alerts and Mutuals in his excellent article “Blood and Base Ball” in the Spring 2009 issue of Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.

gunthers park (1904) & pyotts (early 1920s)

Speaking of early 20th-century semiprofessional baseball in Chicago, Scott Simkus has posted photos of Gunthers Park, ca. 1904, and the Pyotts club in the early 1920s, courtesy of Tom Niesen.  Tom is the great-great-grandson of William C. Niesen, who owned both clubs.  These clubs were sometime members of the famous Chicago City League and frequent opponents of the Leland Giants and their successors the Chicago American Giants, as well as other African American clubs (not to mention the Cuban Stars).