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negro leagues DB update: 1928 NNL & ECL

The 1928 Negro National League champion St. Louis Stars.

Today we add the 1928 Negro leagues to the DB.  This was the year the Eastern Colored League fell apart, putting an end to the first edition of the Black World Series.  Meanwhile the Negro National League continued with a split-season format.  The St. Louis Stars won the first half going away; in the second half, the American Giants just edged the Stars and the Kansas City Monarchs, setting up an NNL championship series with St. Louis that would take the place of the World Series that year.

The problems that doomed the ECL in 1928 had roots going back several years, involving arguments about schedules, players, parks, umpires, and money.  The first real warning signs cropped up in 1927, when the New York Lincoln Giants were kicked out of the ECL for signing the outfielder Estéban Montalvo away from the western Cuban Stars, thus violating the peace deal that had been in effect between the two leagues since 1924.  The Lincolns were readmitted in spring 1928, in exchange for giving Montalvo back to the Cuban Stars.  But then Harrisburg Giants owner Colonel Strothers decided he could no longer afford to bankroll his club, a perennial contender, and folded the team (though the Giants would return midway through 1928 with a less-distinguished roster).  Soon after that Nat Strong's Brooklyn Royal Giants resigned from the league, and the next day Ed Bolden pulled his Hilldale Club, perhaps the ECL's flagship franchise, out of the circuit.  Even with the Lincolns back in the fold, the ECL was still reduced to four clubs.

A Philadelphia gangster named Smittie Lucas had put together a team he called the Eastern League Stars, an all-star team originally intended only for spring play.  Desperate for more teams, especially one based in Philadelphia, the league admitted Lucas's club---though he had to return most of his stars to their original teams, and the name of his outfit was eventually changed to the Philadelphia Tigers.  Another new club, the Brooklyn Stars, failed to materialize.  So the Eastern Colored League started the 1928 season with five teams.

Harmony didn't last long.  When the Harrisburg Giants left the league, their players were divvied up among the other clubs, and outfielders Rap Dixon and Fats Jenkins were awarded to Baltimore.  While Dixon signed with the Black Sox, Jenkins refused, and started appearing for the Lincoln Giants under the pseudonym "Williams."  Other disagreements ensued involving the scheduling of games with independent clubs, particularly Hilldale, and by late May the Lincolns and Cuban Stars had left the league.  Plans to replace them with Syd Pollock's Havana Red Sox and other teams came to nothing, and the Eastern Colored League was finally through.

It's not certain when exactly the league came to end, and no "final" standings were ever published.  If games through May 20 are counted, then the Baltimore Black Sox ended with the best record at 9-3, with five of their wins coming against the Philadelphia Tigers.  The teams continued to play each other (with the exception of the Black Sox and Lincoln Giants, where lingering bad feeling about the Jenkins incident kept them apart through the whole season).  We've chosen to present the standings for all games played between the ECL clubs throughout the 1928 season.  By this measure the Bacharach Giants, champions in 1926 and 1927, took the virtual 1928 ECL pennant as well, with an 18-12 record.

The Bacharachs were helped to this record by none other than Fats Jenkins (.365/.425/.464), whom they immediately stole from the Lincoln Giants when the league dissolved.  Chaney White (.371/.424/.517), player-manager Dick Lundy (.338/.401/.498), and Rats Henderson (8-2, 3.42) also contributed, as did double threat Luther Farrell (.395/.489/.618, 9-7 as a pitcher).  The Baltimore Black Sox enjoyed great seasons from Rap Dixon (.398/.478/.701), Jud Wilson (.399/.492/.652), and Laymon Yokely (12-6, 2.77).  The 44-year-old John Henry Lloyd hit .383 against top black clubs for his Lincoln Giants, while his double play partner, George Scales, hit .328/.416/.605 (which doesn't include a 6 for 6, two home run performance against Hilldale, since a box score hasn't been found yet).  Alex Pompez's Cuban Stars struggled without renaissance man Martín Dihigo, though former Boston Red Sox infielder Ramón Herrera contributed a .331 average, new captain José María Fernández (replacing Pelayo Chacón after 12 years) hit .333, and infielder Angel Alfonso scorched the ball for a .489 average and .872 slugging percentage in 12 games against top black competition.

The Hilldale Club, the team whose abandonment of the ECL probably doomed it, may have been the best club on the east coast in 1928.  Bolden scooped up Oscar Charleston (.346/.449/.605), Walter Cannady (.325/.389/.490), and Darltie Cooper (10-5, 2.39) from the defunct Harrisburg Giants, and used them to revitalize a cast that already included Biz Mackey (.342/.410/.533).  The Homestead Grays grabbed John Beckwith (.306) from Harrisburg, and had already signed Martín Dihigo (.313, 4 homers) away from Pompez in 1927.  The Grays also pirated a couple of NNL stars, enticing lefty Sam Streeter (4-2) to leave the Birmingham Black Barons and Jelly Gardner to abandon the American Giants.  Making the most of a limited opportunity, a 33-year-old West Virginia coal miner named Grover Lewis blasted three home runs for the Grays in a game against Hilldale before disappearing back to Appalachian semipro ball.  (If you haven't already seen it, check out Scott Simkus's great piece about Lewis in a back issue of the Seamheads Outsider Baseball Bulletin.)

Over in the Negro National League, Candy Jim Taylor had been quietly incubating a powerful Stars lineup over the past few seasons; this was the year his patience would bear fruit, as the Stars dominated from the start.  Mule Suttles (.365, 21 home runs), Willie Wells (.357, 21), and Wilson Redus (.352, 22) took full advantage of the 250-foot left field fence at Stars Park, caused by the intrusion of a trolley car barn into the outfield.  Given all those runs to play with, right-handed curveballer Ted Trent pitched well enough (2.36 ERA, 121 strikeouts in214 innings) to go 19-3.  Slap Hensley, Luther McDonald, and Johnny Williams added solid mound work, while Roosevelt Davis became the closest thing to a relief ace the Negro leagues had so far seen, going 8-0 while relieving in twice as many games as he started (15 to 8).

The American Giants relied on the arms of Willie Foster (13-8, 2.82) and Willie Powell (9-6, 2.00) and the bats of Steel Arm Davis (.319/.364/.442) and shortstop Pythias Russ (.339/.372/.431), a converted catcher whose career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis in 1930 at the age of only 26.  The Monarchs lacked the slugging they had become known for in the early 1920s, when they could boast the likes of Dobie Moore and Heavy Johnson in their lineup.  They were now a team that relied on speed, pitching, and glovework.  Andy Cooper (12-7, 3.38) led the pitchers, while catcher Frank Duncan, shortstop Newt Allen, and center fielder Eddie Dwight (whose speed drew comparisons with Cool Papa Bell) anchored a solid defense.  Bullet Rogan, now 34, hit .348/.405/.512, went 10-2 as a pitcher, and even filled in at second base---in addition to managing the team. (He also clouted 3 home runs in a 16-2 route of the Detroit Stars played in Clinton, Missouri, but a box score hasn't been found yet.) This formula worked well enough to give the Monarchs the second-best overall record, although they agonizingly fell short of winning either half.

Utility man Wilson "Stack" Martin got the Detroit Stars' season off to a great start when he hit 6 for 6 on opening day.  Turkey Stearnes popped a league-leading 24 homers, Big George Mitchell went 13-8, Ed Rile, a 6'7" converted pitcher, hit .348/.425/.508, and veteran second baseman Claude Johnson drew a league-leading 40 walks---but these Stars couldn't keep up with the other Stars, finishing in third place overall.  Meanwhile, in a breakout sophomore season the Birmingham Black Barons' Leroy "Satchel" Paige (11-4, 2.32, a league-leading 121 strikeouts in 132 innings) served notice of what was to come.  He couldn't quite lift the Black Barons to a .500 record; while a couple of other pitchers were decent, the hitting was abject, with only Roy Parnell (.316/.365/.503) able to contribute much.

Player-manager Carl Glass (12-10, 2.96) and catcher Larry Brown (.265, sterling defense) were still the mainstays of the otherwise woeful Memphis Red Sox. Of Cleveland's fifth attempt at an NNL team, the Tigers, the less said the better, though it's worth noting the nearly heroic performance of Edward "Babe" Milton, who played eight positions while hitting .354 with 13 triples for an otherwise terrible team.

Tinti Molina's Cuban Stars suffered through one of their worst seasons ever, finishing dead last with a team that managed only two home runs in 47 games.  Most mysteriously, Estéban Montalvo, the slugger who was so good the Lincoln Giants had quit the ECL rather than give him up in 1927, and who had once hit three home runs in a single ECL game all by himself, couldn't hit the side of a barn in 1928, managing only a .136/.219/.189 line.  It's hard not to think that he was perhaps not properly motivated to play for Molina, the manager he'd tried to escape the year before---although in retrospect, he may also have been suffering the early effects of the illness that would finally kill him in 1930.

The league championship was a classic, as recounted by Kevin Johnson.  The teams split four games in Chicago; before the series moved to St. Louis, Chicago's number two starter, Willie Powell, was shot in the face by his father-in-law during a domestic altercation.  He would survive and continue his pitching career, but he was out of this series.  In St. Louis the Stars shortstop Willie Wells took over, blasting six home runs in the last five games (our stats cover only three of them, as two box scores are missing), and the Stars prevailed 5 games to 4.

Crossposted at Seamheads.com.

negro leagues DB update: 1933

Satchel Paige, Gus Greenlee, Josh Gibson

This week we're making a slight break with chronological order and adding the 1933 Negro leagues to the Seamheads Negro Leagues DB. Many thanks to Scott Simkus, the creator of the Strat-O-Matic Negro leagues set, who did most of the heavy lifting on this.

The year 1933 marked something of a fresh beginning for the Negro leagues, with the start of a new league and the inauguration of what became black baseball's biggest event, the annual East-West All-Star Game. The Eastern Colored League had fallen apart in early 1928; its successor, the American Negro League, lasted only a single season. When the Depression broke up the original Negro National League in 1931, it was left to the Negro Southern League to expand temporarily into the north, while Cumberland Posey's East-West League failed to last through the 1932 season. So in 1933 numbers king Gus Greenlee, owner of the independent Pittsburgh Crawfords, started a new Negro National League, one that, unlike Rube Foster's original, tried to bring the east coast and the Midwest together.

The tough economic times continued, and it was hard for Greenlee to keep the league up and going. The Chicago American Giants were evicted from Schorling Park, their home since the team's founding by Rube Foster back in 1911, when it was turned into a dog racing track When the Indianapolis A.B.C.'s moved to Detroit due to low attendance, the American Giants moved to Indianapolis and started playing their home games in the A.B.C.'s former park, Perry Stadium. The Homestead Grays were kicked out in July for poaching two players (Big Jim Williams and Jimmy Binder) from Detroit. Syd Pollock's Cuban Stars opted against taking the Grays' place, and subsequent attempts at placing teams in Akron and Cleveland didn't last long. In the end only the American Giants, Nashville Elite Giants, and Greenlee's own Pittsburgh Crawfords finished the season. The Crawfords and the American Giants both claimed the championship; it wasn't until well into the 1934 season that the Giants conceded the 1933 title to Pittsburgh.

The Crawfords are possibly the most famous team in Negro league history, featuring five Hall of Famers. Their offense was led by the 21-year-old Josh Gibson, by far the league's dominant hitter (.411, 14 home runs), and the 35-year-old first baseman/manager Oscar Charleston (.352, 12 homers). Their pitching may have been even more impressive, with southpaws Sam Streeter (8-2, 2.62) and Leroy Matlock (7-5) and right-hander Bert Hunter (8-1) taking pressure off the undisputed star, Satchel Paige. Paige's won-lost record (4-6) doesn't look like much, but he struck out 77 hitters in 80 innings, sported the Negro leagues' best ERA (2.03). In four of his ten starts against major Negro league competition, Paige suffered 2-0, 2-1, 2-1, and 3-1 losses.

As great as the Crawfords look, the American Giants were more than worthy rivals, with four future Hall of Famers of their own. Though Rube Foster was dead, under the management of Foster protégé Dave Malarcher the Giants had scooped up several of the star players cut loose by the end of Foster's old Negro National League, most notably Willie Wells and Mule Suttles from the defunct St. Louis Stars, and Turkey Stearnes (.346/.404/.590) from the old Detroit Stars. Together with a pitching staff led by Rube's younger brother Willie Foster (6-4, 2.56), the Giants' stars took the first half pennant, and pushed the Crawfords the whole way during the second half.

The Nashville Elite Giants couldn't quite keep up with the big boys, but they did feature fine performances from veteran lefthander Percy "Dimps" Miller (6-2, 3.01), outfielder Wild Bill Wright (.336), catcher Tommie Dukes (.340), and second baseman Sammy T. Hughes (.341). The Baltimore Black Sox, now owned by Joe Cambria, had lost a court battle with former investors and lost the rights to the "Black Sox" name---they played the 1933 season as the Baltimore Sox, with shortstop Jake Dunn (.392) and a towering young southpaw named Stuart Jones (5-3) providing some rare bright spots. The Columbus Blue Birds, managed by Dizzy Dismukes, seemed promising at first, but good hitting from outfielder Jabbo Andrews (.398) and shortstop Leroy Morney (.382) couldn't make up for poor pitching.

The Akron Grays were cobbled together out of players from church teams and local sandlots in both Akron and Pontiac, Michigan, along with a few journeyman veterans (catcher Clarence "Spoony" Palm and outfielder Lou Dials) and a couple of high-profile pitchers on loan from other league teams (Bert Hunter from the Crawfords, Willie Powell from the American Giants). They pretty much performed to expectation. The Cleveland Giants started the 1933 season as a semipro team featuring a female infielder named Isabelle Baxter; upon entering the league they were provided with a roster drawn from the other defunct Ohio teams (Akron and Columbus). They only managed to complete a single league game, a 14 to 7 loss to the Crawfords, then failed to show up for subsequent games in Pittsburgh and Nashville. Disputes over these forfeits contributed greatly to the confusion that marred the season's conclusion.

Greenlee's league aspired to take in the whole blackball world, but several important teams were leery of committing themselves. The Kansas City Monarchs remained aloof, preferring for the most part to barnstorm. The New York Black Yankees (who, despite their name, actually operated out of Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey) claimed the world's colored championship after defeating the Crawfords in a late-season series. Ed Bolden, the key figure behind the old Eastern Colored League, had lost control of his Hilldale Club (which folded after the 1932 season), but founded a new independent team, originally known as Bolden's Philadelphia All-Stars. Behind the hitting of Rap Dixon (.394/.462/.628) and Jud Wilson (.372/.456/.551), the Stars served notice that they would be a team to be reckoned with in the future.

Next up for the DB: 1928 and 1934 Negro leagues; East-West All-Star Games; Mexican League 1937-1954; 1918/19 through 1922/23 and 1927/28 Cuban leagues, including Babe Ruth's famous appearance in Havana with the New York Giants in 1920.

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

negro leagues DB update: florida hotel league, cuban league, 1899-1900 negro leagues

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

We've just added the following to the DB: the 1916/17 Cuban Winter League, the 1917 and 1918 Florida Hotel League, and a handful of games from the 1899 and 1900 seasons, as well as new games for 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, and 1912.

In 1899 the Cuban X Giants came west to play the two Chicago clubs, the Unions (which had existed since the 1880s) and the Columbia Giants, formerly the Page Fence Giants of Adrian, Michigan, which had moved to Chicago under the auspices of the Columbia Club, a local social organization. In addition, 1899 saw Abel Linares organize the first tour of Cuban professionals in the United States. The All-Cubans played a pair of grudge matches against the Cuban X Giants in Hoboken, ostensibly motivated by the (real) Cubans' desire to uphold the honor of their national name.

The following season saw both the Cuban X Giants and the Genuine Cuban Giants come west. That season the American League's new Chicago White Sox built a new park on the South Side at the corner of 39th and Wentworth. Unfortunately this was across the street from the Columbia Giants' park (the former Daly Park, home of the white semipro Daly Baseball Club), and just a couple of blocks away from the Unions' home grounds, at 37th and Butler. Eventually the major leaguers would drive both black teams out of the neighborhood, although the Columbias did use the White Sox park as their home field in 1902. (It would later, as Schorling Park, become the home field for the Chicago American Giants for many years.)

William "Hippo" Galloway, of the 1900 Cuban X Giants, had become in 1899 simultaneously the last black player to appear openly in organized baseball in North America (with the Woodstock club of the Canadian League) and the first black player to appear in a hockey league (with Woodstock in the Central Ontario Hockey Association).

Jumping forward a few years, in the winter of 1916/17 Cuban baseball saw yet another group of organizers put together a new circuit, which they called the Cuban-American League, despite the complete absence of American players. The old Almendares Park had been torn down, and the games were played in Marianao's Oriental Park, which was actually a horse racing venue.

Oriental Park, 1921

The Almendares players were reassembled under the name "Orientals" (or Orientales), while Habana reappeared as the "Red Sox" (Medias Rojas). The traditional third Havana team, Fe, no longer existed, and the previous season's attempt to replace them with a team called San Francisco Park had ended in abject failure. So this year Tinti Molina and Abel Linares simply decided to enter their barnstorming Cuban Stars as the third team, under the name "White Sox" (Medias Blancas).

It took so long to organize everything that the league did not get underway until February 1917, and lasted only 15 games. Dolf Luque pitched and hit well for the Orientals (1.84 ERA, .355 average), and his team did just enough to take the pennant with an 8-6 record.

At exactly the same time as the brief Cuban-American League season, Palm Beach hosted the annual series between teams representing the Royal Poinciana Hotel (managed this year by Rube Foster) and the Breakers Hotel (managed by Joe Williams). The Cuban-American lefty Juan Padrón had been slated to join the Cuban Stars / White Sox in Cuba, but instead he turned up here, pitching for Foster. He started against Joe Williams four times, winning three with one tie. Overall he went 5-2 with three shutouts and an 0.61 ERA, providing just enough for the Poincianas to edge the Breakers 7 games to 6. The winter of 1917/18 saw no formal league organized in Cuba, but the Palm Beach series continued. Juan Padrón switched sides, but managed only a single win this time. Meanwhile Dick Whitworth went 5-0, 1.07, for the Poincianas. That was enough for Foster's team to win 9 out of 14 games.

Coming up for the DB: the 1933 Negro league season, the East-West All-Star Games, the Mexican League, more Cuban seasons, and a lot more.

 

Bill Galloway, Juan Padrón, Dick Whitworth

negro leagues DB update: 1915/16 cuban league & florida hotel league

Eustaquio Pedroso, John Donaldson, Joe Williams

This week we've added two leagues from the 1915/16 winter season---the Cuban League and the Florida Hotel League---along with the 1907 Southern Championship contested between the Birmingham Giants and San Antonio Black Bronchos.

In Cuba, due to a labor dispute, the old Cuban National League was no more, replaced by a player-led league, the Cuban National Association. The players of the three former clubs--Almendares, Fe, and Habana---reorganized themselves into teams called Almendares Park, Habana Park, and San Francisco Park, presumably unable to use the old team names for legal reasons.

In 1914/15 Fe, despite hiring Spot Poles, Dick Redding, and several other black players from the United States, had finished with an abject 5-28 record. So it probably seemed safe for San Francisco Park, the team that took Fe's place, to dispense with the Americans and add Eustaquio Pedroso, perhaps the most valuable player in Cuban baseball the past couple of winters. But Pedroso soon switched back to Almendares Park and San Francisco Park lost 21 out of 22 games, whereupon the league sent to the United States for Rube Foster and his Chicago American Giants to replace them. Foster's team, still playing under the San Francisco name, won 5 and lost 9 before returning to the U.S., and a thrown-together outfit lost the club's last three scheduled games. Altogether, the three different versions of San Francisco Park fielded a total of 56 players.

Despite the cosmetic name changes, Almendares and Habana fielded similar teams to their 1914/15 editions. Habana Park again featured mostly players from organized baseball in the U.S., including major leaguers Armando Marsans and Mike González, but lost the pennant to Almendares Park. The eventual champions starred Cristóbal Torriente (.401/.491/.562), Manuel Cueto (.403/.481/.493), Gervasio González (.370/.517/.407, with a league-leading 32 walks), and Dolf Luque (12-5, 2.80), along with the two-way threat Pedroso, who hit .451 and went 9-2 as a pitcher after leaving San Francisco Park for Almendares.

This would be the last winter season in old Almendares Park, which was torn down and replaced by a new stadium in time for the 1918/19 season.

Meanwhile in Palm Beach, Florida, the New York Lincoln Giants and the Indianapolis ABCs clashed in a 15-game series. The annual Florida Hotel League, also known as the Coconut League, had taken place from January to March since at least the mid-1900s. The teams represented the exclusive Breakers Hotel and Royal Poinciana Hotel. The 1916 series saw John Donaldson, already a legendary, fireballing southpaw for J. L. Wilkinson's All-Nations Club, make his big-time blackball debut. It was a rough start, as the equally legendary Cyclone Joe Williams out-dueled him several times. Unfortunately we only have box scores for 6 of 15 games that year, and in those games Donaldson went 0-4.

Our additions to the DB also bring us back to the start of Joe Williams's career at the age of 21, with the San Antonio Black Bronchos in 1907, playing for the Southern black championship against C. I. Taylor's Birmingham Giants.

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

negro leagues DB update: 1902 - 1906 negro leagues

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

The newest update to the Negro Leagues DB adds no fewer than five deadball seasons---1902 through 1906---plus a number of additional games for later seasons, and lots of new and corrected biographical information.

We loosely use the term "season" here, as the farther back you go in history, the fewer and fewer games African American teams played against each other. Most of their schedules---which could range from 80 or 90 games to 150 or more---pitted them against white semipro, amateur, or minor league teams. So the DB, which at the moment only counts games between black teams in the United States, will represent thinner and thinner slivers of a team's season, and a player's career, with each step backwards in time. (Incidentally, when we get to the later 1930s and 1940s, you will see a similar effect, as Negro league schedules contract and fewer newspapers print box scores for black teams.)

In 1902 we've got a three-game series between Chicago's Columbia Giants, managed by Grant Johnson, and Frank Leland's Union Giants, a descendent of the Chicago Unions, a team that was founded in 1888.

Though the major black teams on the east coast, the Cuban X Giants and Philadelphia Giants, did not play each other in 1902, they finally hooked up in 1903 in a major series for the "colored base ball championship of the world." The X-Giants, led by Grant Johnson and Rube Foster, who had both jumped from the West, handily beat Sol White's Philadelphia club, 5 games to 2.

In 1904 Foster, Charlie "Tokohama" Grant, infielder Johnny Hill, and the young rookie outfielder Pete Hill absconded to the Philadelphia Giants, and the balance of power swung their way. In September Philadelphia met the Cuban X Giants in Atlantic City to relitigate the "colored championship of the world." Rube Foster set the tone in game one by striking out 18 of his former teammates, and the Philadelphia Giants won the series, two out of three.

(Philadelphia Inquirer, September 2, 1904)

This inaugurated a run of four seasons for the Philadelphia Giants in which they black baseball on the east coast. The team's 1905 edition added an all-time great, Grant Johnson, to an already formidable lineup. Unfortunately they could not agree to any games with the Cuban X Giants or the real Cuban team, the All-Cubans, that season, though they did play ten games against the overmatched Brooklyn Royal Giants (in only their second year of existence), winning nine and tying one.

The following season, 1906, saw the founding of the International League of Independent Professional Base Ball Clubs, an organization made up two genuine Cuban teams, the Cuban Stars and Havana Stars, a local white team, the Philadelphia Professionals, and two African American teams, the Cuban X Giants and the new Philadelphia Quaker Giants. The Quaker Giants were founded by Jess and Eddie McMahon, two New York promoters who managed Harlem's Olympic Field, a frequent venue for black teams (they would later found the New York Lincoln Giants; Jess's grandson is Vince McMahon). William Freihofer, owner of the Philadelphia Professionals, served as league president and donated a cup, named after him, for the championship. The league had a heavily Cuban flavor - in addition to the two clubs actually from the island, the X Giants began to live up to their name by signing actual Cubans themselves, including stars like José Muñoz, Regino García, Luis Bustamante, and Emilio Palomino.

The International League was pretty unstable, with both the Cuban clubs dropping out and the Quaker Giants folding. The lost teams were replaced by the Philadelphia Giants; the Riverton-Palmyras (another white team); and the Wilmington Giants from Delaware, organized by an old nineteenth century blackball star, George Williams. It was (no surprise) the Philadelphia Giants who eventually won the Freihofer Cup.

In 1907 the International League would exclude the white teams and morph into the National Association of Colored Professional Clubs of the United States and Cuba.

This update also adds a number of games in subsequent seasons, especially eastern games in 1912 and 1913.

Research on western games, especially for 1903, 1904, 1906, and 1907, continues, and will be posted when ready. Also coming up: the 1933 Negro leagues, the Florida Hotel League, and (as always) more Cuban seasons.

jack hannibal, arthur coleman, mckinley brewer

This might be among the least-noticed of my work at the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, but I’m personally very happy about being able to identify some minor Indianapolis players from the 1910s.

1) Jack Hannibal was a middleweight boxer who moonlighted as a professional baseball and football player in the 1910s and 1920s.  As I tried to track him down in official records, it soon became clear that “Jack Hannibal” was a boxing pseudonym.  Eventually it turned out that his real name was Porter Lee Floyd.  He was born in Campbellsville, Kentucky, in 1891, and moved to Indianapolis with his parents when he was five.  A high school track star, Floyd first entered the ring professionally in 1912, and he boxed, mostly locally, until 1928.  Supposedly out of 100 fights in his career he lost only five.  As a professional ballplayer he appeared intermittently in the outfield for local Indianapolis teams in the 1910s, appearing under four names: Porter, Lee, Floyd, and Hannibal.  Against the best black professional competition from 1913 to 1916, he batted 28 for 65 in 17 games, .431/.456/.600.  He continued to be active and popular on the local sports scene until his death in 1949 at the early age of 58.  According to the Indianapolis player and journalist Tiny Baldwin, Jack Hannibal was

“a quiet man, who always managed to talk at the right time, and only the right time.  Jack put each player on a high pedestal and made him feel he was on top of the world, and that way gave the players that little extra something which made each give his everything every time he strode onto the diamond.  His famous words were: ‘Every time I get out of Indianapolis, I like Indianapolis that much more’.” (Indianapolis Recorder, August 20, 1955, p. 11)

2)  It was previously thought that Clarence Coleman, a longtime catcher for the Union Giants and other barnstorming teams, also pitched for several Midwestern teams from about 1916 to 1921.  As I compiled stats for the late 1910s and early 1920s, it soon emerged that there must have been two Colemans active at the time: the catcher Clarence, who was a fairly well-known figure, and another Coleman who was a left-handed pitcher.  In 1920, for example, the southpaw Coleman pitched for the Dayton Marcos while Clarence Coleman was catching for the Union Giants.  Julius Culpepper observed the “big south paw” doing mound duty for the Marcos:

“A bird by the name of Coleman was put in to do the hurling…The chap had a strange kind of delivery, the like of which has never been before.  It fooled both the batter and the umpire as well for a while but at least it faded and did not last long” (Chicago Whip, July 24, 1920).

Coleman was only a marginal pitcher, and for a long time I assumed I would never found out anything else about him.  But I recently ran across this letter, printed in Tiny Baldwin’s “Passing Sportinalities” column in the Indianapolis Recorder:

“Mr. Tiney –
    I can’t place you but read your column every week.  Indianapolis is my native home – born on the Southside, raised on the Eastside.  Played with the Marion Ramblers from their start until they disbanded.  Played with Bowser’s or Jewell’s ABC’s after they split from C. I. Taylor, with such players as Todd Allen, Cat Francis, Puggie Hutchinson, George Board, Jack Hannibal, Blackwell, Rogers, Jack Watts and Joe ‘45’ Scotland.
     George Abram and Warner Jewell were managers.  I was a left-handed pitcher.  About Elvis Holland – he used to ask me about holding the ball.  It has been 40 years since I saw him.  He and Paige are about the same age.  I am 60 years old and Holland is younger than I.
     Yours truly –
     Arthur Coleman”
(Indianapolis Recorder, April 12, 1958, p. 14)

“Elvis Holland” is of course the great pitcher, and Indianapolis native, Bill Holland (full name Elvis William Holland), who was Arthur Coleman’s teammate on the 1919 Jewell’s A.B.C.s.

3) A player of a similar vintage, a pitcher/outfielder named Brewer, had been identified in some reference works as “Luther Brewer.”  I concluded that this was a mistake resulting from the omission of a comma in the summary section of a box score in a 1919 issue of the Indianapolis Freeman; Luther Farrell, who went by the name of Al Farrell early in his career, had pitched for the 1919 Jewell’s A.B.C.s alongside Brewer (and Arthur Coleman).  “Luther” and “Brewer” were listed side by side in the box score without a comma between them, and I think it’s possibility that a researcher thought this meant there was someone named “Luther Brewer,” rather than two different players.

Anyway, I was able to confirm this, again via a Tiny Baldwin article, this one from 1955 (see the bottom of the first column):

(Indianapolis Recorder, August 6, 1955, p. 11)

Brewer passed away on September 23, 1955, just six weeks after his words were published in the Recorder.

 

negro leagues database: update

Here’s a recap of the last couple of months at the Seamheads Negro Leagues DB, in case you haven’t been keeping track.  Since November we’ve added:

1) Patrick Rock’s 1923 Negro National League, including Turkey Stearnes’s rookie year, the Monarchs’ first pennant, and 39-year-old Candy Jim Taylor’s bizarre 20-homer season.

2) The little-known Cuban Summer League from 1904 to 1908, plus the Cuban Winter League,1902/03 & 1903/04, which covers quite a bit of great hitting by Julián Castillo and great pitching by Carlos Royer.

3) 1914 & 1915 independent black clubs, which pushes our Negro league coverage back to the dawn of C. I. Taylor’s tenure with the A.B.C.s, and includes some great seasons by his brother Ben Taylor, Cristóbal Torriente, and Dizzy Dismukes.

Plus we’ve made innumerable additions and improvements to the biographical record of players and managers.  This is just me, but I’m especially happy about tracking down some obscure Indianapolis players from the 1910s, such as Jack Hannibal, Arthur Coleman, and McKinley Brewer.   We’ve also gotten significant help from Brian McKenna, who has recently done a series of biographies of early black ballplayers such as Danger Talbert, Doc Sykes, Bingo DeMoss, and Tullie McAdoo.

There hasn’t been a huge amount of commentary about the contents of the Database yet, but Alex King at the Baseball Think Factory’s Hall of Merit has used DB figures to help with his analysis of Cannonball Dick Redding’s pitching and Cyclone Joe Williams’s hitting.

Coming next to the Negro Leagues DB: 1912 & 1913 Negro leagues and 1913/14 & 1914/1915 Cuban leagues.

Also: if anybody can help us get box scores in Atlantic City, Kansas City, or Chicago, it would be greatly appreciated (email me if you’re interested).