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.

Comments

[james e. brunson]

Many postbellum "colored baseballists" belonged to what I call a "hotel-waiter subculture." The West Ends, the Metropolitans, and the Manhattans are exemplary. The Manhattans began as the Clarendons, waiters at the Clarendon Hotel. The black professional walker Frank H. Hart played for the Leonidas Club, another hotel nine. It was probably here that the St. Louis Black Stockings manager Henry Bridgewater perhaps saw the Clarendons and Hart's aggregation cross bats. Bridgewater recruited Hart to play for him in 1884.