agate type

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.

luis padrón & rule 52

More than a year and a half ago I reported on a couple of items from Cuban newspapers in 1909 claiming that Luis Padrón’s contract had actually been purchased by the Chicago White Sox when he tried out for them on July 22.  According to the pseudonymous correspondent “Bancroft,” who was supposedly reporting from Chicago, Comiskey paid Abel Linares and Tinti Molina $1000 for the rights to Padrón.  The player wasn’t supposed to report to the White Sox until mid-September. If true, this would mean not only that Padrón was twice the property of a major league club without being called up (the other team being the 1913 Boston Braves), but that he was the first Cuban League product to have been signed by the major leagues, predating Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans by nearly two years (even if he never actually played).

At the time I actually thought this story sounded unlikely, in large part because I strongly doubted that a major league club would bother to pay a club outside organized baseball—especially one that employed black players and played on the blackball circuit—for a player.  There was, I supposed, the chance that Comiskey might have wanted to cultivate a relationship with Linares and Molina in the hopes of establishing a permanent pipeline of Cuban talent to the White Sox.  That would have been a pretty noteworthy development, considering that no Cuban League players had made it to the majors yet, so I was dubious. 

That was before I had heard of Rule 50, a clause added to the National Agreement in July 1909, right before Padrón’s tryout with the White Sox.  Here’s the account in Sporting Life (July 10, 1909):

It may be worth noting that sources in the U.S. reported (mistakenly, I had previously assumed) that Comiskey had actually signed Padrón, as in this note from Sporting Life (July 31, 1909):

So protection was extended to semiprofessional clubs, especially those in the Chicago area, in early July, 1909—and within a few weeks Luis Padrón of the Cuban Stars (who spent a large portion of their summer in Chicago) was reported to have been signed by the White Sox for a fee.  Coincidence?

There was also talk in early 1910 that the semipro Chicago City League would become formally a part of Organized Baseball.  Considering that the League had featured one black team for several years (the Leland Giants in 1908 and 1909, the Chicago Giants in 1910) this would have been quite a landmark.  The notion came to nothing, of course.  One assumes in any case that if the Chicago League had joined OB, the black teams would have been kicked out—as in fact they were after 1910 anyway.

Rule 50—which became Rule 52 in 1910—and its protection of semiprofessional contracts lasted for less than a year.  Francis Richter explains in Sporting Life (June 18, 1910)

NOTE: The image of the Luis Padrón baseball card, from the 1909 Cabañas set, can be found at Cubanball.com.

from the havana red sox to the abraham lincoln brigade

What do the Cuban Stars, Langston Hughes, Syd Pollock, the Spanish Civil War, and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén all have in common?  Check out my turn as guest author at Gary Cieradkowski’s Infinite Baseball Card Set. 

history in fragments

Anybody who knows better can tell me differently, but as far as I know there is only a single microfilm edition of the Chicago Defender.  The original copy came (I believe) from the University of Chicago.  Unfortunately, while this is a decent run of the paper, it is far from complete or pristine.  Some entire issues are missing, or are represented by only a couple of pages (such as July 14 and July 21, 1917).   Since the Defender was in those days a weekly paper, such gaps in the record can have a huge impact.

Then there are problems like this:  a full, play-by-play account of an American Giants-Cuban Stars game (played on June 10, 1917, one of the few games Dick Redding lost all season) that was mangled in the University of Chicago’s original copy of the paper.  We’re left with only the first four and a half innings.  You can just make out that Frank Warfield threw out Bill Francis to start the bottom of the fifth; but what happened to Leroy Grant or Bruce Petway, who batted after him?

 

Now, if another library—just one other library—has a run of the actual, printed-on-paper Chicago Defender, we would stand a very good chance of being able to fill in the gaps left by the standard microfilm edition—just as I did with a couple of Cuban Stars games in 1921.  But did  anybody else save the paper?  It’s true that probably not that many libraries would have subscribed to and saved African-American newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century; but really, no place else, not even in New York City or Philadelphia, or even somewhere else in Chicago?  And what about the Chicago Defender itself?  What little I know about it suggests that black weeklies, due to cost and space constraints, simply haven’t been able to keep complete archives, especially from decades ago.

If anybody knows of a library or collection or archive that houses an honest-to-goodness dead-tree run of the Defender (not just a few scattered issues, but a stretch of years) from the first three or four decades of the twentieth century, let me know.

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.