agate type

josé del valle méndez, part iii

Here is Tito Rondon on the question of José Méndez’s real name:

“‘José del Valle y Méndez’ means his first last name is Valle (or del Valle, makes no difference; del is just a conjuction, which is why it is not capitalized, same as van or vander in dutch). And his second last name, or mother's maiden name, is Méndez.

“In conservative Latin societies, if at the time of your birth your mom was not married to your dad, you got her last name as your own. Then, maybe you would use your dad’s last name as your second last name, or maybe your adoptive father’s (maybe mom’s new hubby). And if she divorced the new guy, you could change yours too if you liked the new guy better.

“So the 1912 Ramos could be the appropriate second last name at the time, and Baez the appropiate one thereafter, and maybe he found out by 1918 that his father’s last name had been Valle, and used that on official documents trying to accommodate U. S. usage.

[…]

“Of course, de la Caridad is his middle name; in the draft card someone put his last name in the middle name spot by mistake, something that would be repeated for decades by ballplayers, like Latigo Gutiérrez being known as René Valdez in the U. S.

[…]

“Your research on his mom, Marcelina [see below], looks pretty definite to me, so it is clear he used her last name as his. And I guess he pretty much preferred to use Baez as his second last name during the latter part of his career. Which he has a right to. So it is José de la Caridad Méndez Báez.

“However, you have just revealed the true mystery. Who was José’s father? I'll ask some Cuban historians (as I am not one) and let you know.....”

A few additional notes from Tito and from my own research:

• Tito also disposes of the version of Méndez’s full name given by Roberto González Echevarría in The Pride of Havana, “José de la Caridad Méndez Arco de Tejada.”  There was, Tito says, a Cuban sportswriter “with a peculiar sense of humor, who gave ballplayers and famous people fanciful second last names based on Spanish noble names, usually compound last names. ‘Arco de Tejada’ is one such feeble attempt at humor; please disregard it.”

Incidentally, the longtime Pittsburgh Courier sportswriter and columnist, Wesley Rollo Wilson, had a very similar habit, often for example calling Judy Johnson (whose middle name was Julius) “Julius Caesar Johnson.”

• In a 1920 interview with the newspaper Diario de la Marina, the legendary slugger Julián Castillo refers to Méndez as “the celebrated Méndez-Colmenar del Valle.”  Tito’s comment: “It could very well be. Some people with compound names preferred to simplify, and dropped half of it. So Jose could very well be named Colmenar del Valle and refer to himself as ‘del Valle’ or even simply Valle.”

• On Méndez’s mother: the World War I draft card for José del Valle Méndez lists his nearest relative as “Marcelina del Valle,” of 38 Factoria, Habana, Cuba.  Marcelina was Méndez’s mother’s first name, and her address in 1917 was 38 Factoria in Havana.  Here is what’s entered as Méndez’s relative or friend in Cuba on passenger lists in the 1910s:

June 10, 1912: “Mrs. M. Mendez, mother”

May 7, 1914: “mother Marcelina Lugones”

April 22, 1916: “mother Marcelina Méndez” (Méndez crossed out,
actually traveled the next day)

April 23, 1916: “mother Marcelina Menendez [sic]”

May 9, 1917: “mother M. Mendez Lugore [sic], Factoria 38” (same
address she is given on Méndez’s draft card)

May 13, 1917: “mother M. Lugones, Factoria 38”

The image of Méndez above was snagged from somewhere on the internet (I’m forgetting where at the moment), but it is originally a detail from a team photo of the 1920 Kansas City Monarchs.

was the national association a major league?

Was the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (1871-1875) a “major league”? Your answer, obviously, depends on what you mean by “major league,” and on how much importance you attach to the label.  People often interpret the conferral or denial of the major league label as a verdict on the league, its quality of play, and the admissibility of its playing records as measures of performance.  If the NA’s a major league, then its stats “count” for various purposes; if not, they don’t, which generally means that Ross Barnes or Deacon White or somebody is held not to be HOF-worthy.  Yet the NA’s quality of play is not what the debate was originally about.

The modern roots of this dispute lie in the decision of the Special Baseball Records Committee in 1968 to exclude the NA from the ranks of the major leagues due to its “erratic schedule and procedures,” while including as “major” such paragons of stability as the Union Association.

What was the context of this decision?  The Special Records Committee was convened by the commissioner to adjudicate problems and discrepancies that arose out of the effort to create The Baseball Encyclopedia.  What they were trying to decide was what should be included in the “official” record.  In the end, the NA could not be entirely ignored, because it was in fact the top level of professional baseball in its time.  But its numbers were segregated in their own section, and the players’ individual entries in the main section of the encyclopedia all started with the 1876 National League.

Look at the NA statistics in the early editions of the Big Mac.  There are no extra base hits, no batters’ walks, no pitchers’ walks or strikeouts.  Many, many blank spaces, in other words—a lack of detail that goes far, far beyond later gaps in caught stealing or batters’ strikeout data, for instance.  The statistical record on the NA was, in the late 1960s, just not up to the standard of the rest of major league history.

A number of the deficiencies commonly cited against the NA’s major status and held to taint its playing statistics—imbalanced schedules, the membership of second-tier clubs such as the Keokuk Westerns, the domination of the Boston Red Stockings—also characterize the putatively “major” Union Association, say, or the 1890 American Association.  Rather, I have a feeling that the sketchiness of the statistical record available for the league in 1968—a simple lack of numbers for many categories—was the key factor in getting it declared non-major.  It would have made the early players’ records look incomplete, even ugly; and it would have interfered with the calculation of career totals and averages.

That’s not really a problem anymore, of course.  But the dispute remains, partly because some people misinterpret the 1968 decision (and the institutional inertia that has allowed it to stand) as a verdict by knowledgeable authorities on the quality of play in the National Association when, I’d suggest, it was really about the completeness of information.  In other words, it was not about how the stats are unreliable measures of performance because of too many games against the Middletown Mansfields or whatever; it was about how the stats were (at that time) incomplete.

In the end, I completely agree with this post.  Whether or not you label the NA a major league really isn’t going to change the way people interested in the 1870s think about it.  Anyone analyzing the careers of early professional ballplayers will use NA data, regardless of MLB’s or the Elias Sports Bureau’s official dictates about its status.  The NA will remain what it was, no matter what labels we impose on it or which section of the encyclopedias we put it in.  And, with historical baseball data increasingly computerized and online, such editorial decisions are less and less relevant in any case.

UPDATE  11:55 a.m. Btw, it’s important to emphasize that the original 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia was a major event in both the baseball and publishing worlds as 1) the first trade book entirely typeset on a computer and 2)  the first attempt to reconcile and correct the whole major league record.  The “look” of the thing, and specifically the appearance of completeness, could not have been too far from anyone’s mind.

“the black ty cobb”

Bill James remarked of Spottswood Poles that he is “often called ‘The Black Ty Cobb’, usually by John Holway” (New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 190).

A gentle dig at Holway, perhaps, but not really one he deserves.  For example, in 1919 Ed Bolden, longtime Hilldale owner and founder of the Eastern Colored League, referred in a Chicago Defender article to “Spottswood Poles, better known in the East as the black ‘Ty Cobb’…” (February 22, 1919).  In 1911 the Cuban sportswriter Abel Du-Breuil said that “Poles es un Ty Cobb en las bases” (La Lucha, February 14, 1911).  

We get annoyed now (at least I do) when an African-American player from the Jim Crow era is referred to as “the black Ruth” or “the black Gehrig” or the black whomever. But it was common in the 1910s for players, especially if they were fast and/or daring on the bases, to be compared to Cobb.  (Du-Breuil also called Armando Marsans “el Ty Cobb cubano.”)  Poles was an exciting baserunner, so the comparison came up relatively frequently.  Annoying or not, it did happen.  John Holway didn’t make it up. 

The image of Poles is from the Negro League Baseball Players Association website.

josé del valle méndez, part ii

I’ve obtained a much better copy of the World War I draft card for José Méndez in Chicago, which confirms that he was employed by Rube Foster of 3242 Vernon Ave., and pretty much cinches the case that this is the Hall of Fame pitcher. In this copy you can make out his signature much more clearly, and it appears that he signed it “Jose del Valle y Mendez.”

This means that José Méndez himself signed a document that gives a totally different birthdate and name than what we have seen before.

Incidentally, I suspect the information here was probably itself drawn from another official document provided by Méndez. The registrar followed what I think was the standard practice of filling out the card herself, while the registrant—Méndez—simply signed it. She carefully included the accent marks in Méndez’s name, which Méndez himself did not bother with in his signature. While it’s possible she was fluent in or familiar with Spanish and knew where to put the accents, I think a more likely explanation is that she simply copied his name from some other source. This would work against any suspicion that the name or birthdate was a result of miscommunication between Méndez and the registrar.

cuban stars, 1915

Here’s another photo I don’t recall seeing before, from the Indianapolis Ledger (July 10, 1915, p. 4):

These, of course, are the Linares/Molina (western) Cuban Stars; that’s Tinti Molina in the suit and hat, between Pastor Pareda and Agustín Parpetti.

The photographer, J. C. Patton, was actually pretty well-known.  In 1915 he was the only African-American present at the National Photographers Association of America convention (held in Indianapolis), and samples of his work can be found on, for example, the Ohio Historical Society website.  He took this photograph of the 317th Engineers baseball team on July 31, 1918, at Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio:

While I’ve seen a few references to this team, I don’t think I have any box scores or names of players, so at this point I can’t identify any of these men.

struck by lightning

In Dave Wyatt’s 1917 piece for the Indianapolis Freeman called “Death in the Game,” he lists 38 prominent figures in black baseball who had died prematurely in the last ten years, with cause and place of death.  One of the more unusual demises is that of Bedford of the Cuban Giants who was, Wyatt says, killed by lightning in Louisville.

Bedford’s death, as it happens, made the pages of Sporting Life (September 4, 1909, p. 6).  It actually occurred not in Louisville, but in Atlantic City:

William Bedford appears in the 1900 census living in Cairo, Illinois, with his parents Sam and Frances Bedford and several siblings.  He was born in December, 1885, in Illinois, meaning he hadn’t yet reached his twenty-fourth birthday when he was killed.  Although I found his parents and some siblings still living in Cairo in the 1910 census, I don’t think William’s widow or children were among them.

resort teams

Patrick Rock and I were talking a while back about how many blackball teams were based at resort towns, hotels, hot springs, casino towns, and the like.  It started with the very first professional black team, the Cuban Giants, who were originally based at the Argyle Hotel in Babylon, New York.  After that I can name these:

The Royal Poinciana and Breakers hotel teams in Palm Beach, Florida, who played a series in February and March referred to as the “Coconut League” or Florida Hotel League;

The West Baden Sprudels and French Lick Plutos of Indiana, which in the early to mid 1910s played a very similar series called the “Spring Valley League”;

The Long Branch Cubans;

Pop Watkins’s Havana Red Sox, based for several years in the 1910s in Watertown, New York;

The Lost Island Giants;

The Bacharach Giants in Atlantic City.

Some versions of the Tokohama story have Charlie Grant playing for a black team in Hot Springs, Arkansas, when John McGraw signed him in 1901.  There was Negro League baseball in Hot Springs, in any case; Edgar Wesley’s World War I draft card has him playing for a Texas Colored League club located there.

One of the key questions about these teams is who their audiences were.  I’ve seen it said that they were put together to entertain the largely black staffs of the hotels and resorts; but there are also those who argue that they played for the (white) vacationers. I’d suspect it varies from place to place, although all these teams were manned by professional ballplayers, which makes it seem more likely that they were after the disposable income of the guests.

You could, I suppose, make the case that the Havana-based Cuban League was something of a resort league, in that tourism certainly funneled a lot of cash into the city’s economy.  However, there’s little question about the league’s fan base, which was almost entirely Cuban.  Americans in Havana were much more interested in the horses.

Here’s a photo of the Breakers hotel team from 1915:

This is from the Hall of Fame library. The players are identified thusly:

Back row: Unknown, Dick Redding, Pop Lloyd, Jude Gans, Louis Santop, Leroy Grant

Middle row: Unknown, Dicta Johnson, Joe Williams, Zack Pettus, Bill Francis

Front row: Pete Hill, Unknown, Unknown, Spottswood Poles

Based on the single 1915 Breakers-Royal Poinciana box score I have, the four unknowns are probably (not in any particular order) Sam Mongin, Dick Wallace, William “Knux” James, and Jesse Barber.  I did spend some time with Phil Dixon’s marvelous book of photographs (along with some other books), squinting at tiny pictures of faces trying to work out who was who.  But I am really no good at that, so if anybody has any ideas leave them in the comments.

indianapolis ABCs, 1914

Here’s a photo of the 1914 ABCs I haven’t seen before (or don’t remember, in any case), from the Indianapolis Ledger, October 24, 1914.  This was, of course, C. I. Taylor’s first ABCs team.

(click to enlarge)

lost treasures

Robert Sengstacke, heir to the founder of the Chicago Defender, has donated what sounds like hundreds of boxes of files to the Chicago Public Library.  I wonder what baseball-related artifacts have lain hidden all these years?

john henry

Over the weekend I read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Drivin’ Man, a book that ought to ring familiar to any reader of this blog in its methods and concerns.  Nelson makes a case that he has found the historical original for the folk hero John Henry.  I can’t pretend to evaluate his research with any authority, but it certainly sounds plausible.  Read the book and see what you think.

I don’t want to give too much away, as it’s a genuine historical detective story.  Stop reading if you don’t want even the slightest hint of a spoiler, though I don’t think this is much of one.  Assuming Nelson is correct, then here is John Henry’s entry in the 1870 census, as a prisoner in the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond:

I just thought it would be cool to look it up.  It’s kind of like seeing Paul Bunyan’s birth certificate or something.