agate type

which taylor brother is it?

Over at Seamheads.com last month I posted the following photo, which I identified as Ben Taylor:

You may have noticed that this player has been identified as Ben’s older brother Steel Arm Johnny Taylor in more than one source.  In fact, I originally used this very picture to illustrate John Taylor in the Negro Leagues DB.

It comes from this team photo of the 1912 New York Lincoln Giants:

This photo has been published several times, notably in Phil Dixon’s The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History (1992) and Dick Clark and Larry Lester’s The Negro Leagues Book (1994).  In both books the player is identified as Steel Arm Taylor, probably for a couple of reasons:

1) He has been labeled “Taylor P.”  John Taylor is the only one of the Taylor brothers now remembered as primarily a pitcher, so it makes sense this would be him.

2) There’s a report in the June 27, 1912, New York Age that the Lincolns  had signed “Steel Arm Taylor” of the previous year’s St. Louis Giants, and that he then pitched the Lincolns to a victory over the Pittsburgh Giants on June 23.

However, I’ve become quite certain that the Lincoln Giants’ “Taylor P” is really Ben.  Here's why:

1) It simply looks more like Ben Taylor, at least to me.  Here are a few photos of Ben from various sources:

Meanwhile here are a couple of solidly ID’d photos of Johnny Taylor:

2) His height is wrong for Johnny Taylor.  In the Lincoln Giants photo, he’s obviously taller than Spottswood Poles, who’s standing next to him, and comparable in height to Judy Gans.  On their World War II draft cards Poles is listed (generously, I’d say) at 5’9” and Gans is 5’11”.  John Boyce Taylor, meanwhile, is 5’5 ½”.  I don’t have a draft card for Ben, but a photo of the four Taylor brothers standing together printed in the Indianapolis Freeman in 1910 shows that John was clearly several inches shorter than Ben (and C. I.), and about the same height as Candy Jim Taylor (whose draft card has him at 5’5”). 

L to R: James Allen Taylor, John Boyce Taylor, Charles Isham Taylor, Benjamin Harrison Taylor

(Indianapolis Freeman, April 16, 1910)

In the following photo of the 1914 Indianapolis A.B.C.s, Steel Arm Johnny is standing on the far left, next to Dicta Johnson, who was 5’7” according to his draft card.  Ben, meanwhile, is standing next to Edgar Burch, who was 5’10”.

In this photo of the 1909 St. Paul Gophers (from Todd Peterson's great book Early Black Baseball in Minnesota, but originally published in the same issue of the Freeman as the Taylor brothers photo, in fact on the same page), Steel Arm Johnny is standing on the far left.



Also look back at the photo of the 1910 Chicago Giants I posted the other day--John Taylor is standing, third from left, clearly shorter than Walter Ball and Harry Moore and about the same height as Bobby Winston (5’6”).

3) It’s now largely forgotten that Ben was primarily known as a pitcher in 1912.  It probably wasn’t until he joined the A.B.C.s in 1914 that he definitively became known as a first baseman above all.

4) John Taylor was pitching for the West Baden Sprudels from late June to late August, the same time I have “Taylor” documented in Lincoln Giants box scores.  There’s no doubt about the identity of the Sprudels’ pitcher—he’s referred to several times as “Steel Arm,” or “J. B. Taylor,” or “Johnny Taylor.”  The New York Age claimed that “Steel Arm Taylor” pitched for the Lincoln Giants on June 23, 1912, but “J. B. Taylor” was the winning pitcher for the Sprudels in Indiana on June 30.  I suspect the Age simply mistook Ben for Steel Arm, or wrongly applied the nickname to Ben (both had pitched for St. Louis in 1911).

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.

photos of kuebler’s park, st. louis, ca. 1909

Courtesy of Dwayne Isgrig, here are some photos of Kuebler’s Park, intermittent home of the St. Louis Giants from 1908 through 1915.  Dwayne obtained them from the granddaughter of Henry Kuebler, brother of Conrad Kuebler, financial backer of the Giants through much of this period.

It might be hard to see, but a close examination of the buildings in the background show that this is indeed the same ballpark that appears in this photo from the Indianapolis Freeman.  They also seem to match up with the buildings that line the opposite side of Pope Avenue in the 1908 fire insurance map of St. Louis found by Kevin Johnson.

schorling park, chicago: may 27, 1923

 Here, in a wonderfully high-res scan from Robert Edward Auctions, is a panoramic photograph of a 1923 Chicago American Giants-Kansas City Monarchs game at Schorling Park.

(click to enlarge)
 
You will recognize this photograph from one of my posts a couple of years ago—it appeared, with the same captions and insets (the box with the series scores on the left, the photo of Rube Foster on the right), in a 1925 book edited by John Taitt called Souvenir of Negro Progress: Chicago, 1779-1925, and can be found (in a lower-res version) at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

Contrary to the description on the auction page, the Negro National League did not hold playoffs between the top two teams from 1920 through 1923.  The pennant winner was simply the team with the best record at the end of the season.  So this game was not part of a championship series.  It was, in fact, a normal regular-season contest, held on Sunday, May 27, 1923, with over 17,000 in attendance.  It was so crowded they put up temporary grandstands—one of which, holding 1500 people, collapsed at the end of the seventh inning.  Amazingly only 28 people suffered serious injuries, and the game was resumed.

 
(Chicago Daily Tribune, May 28, 1923, page 3)

It was a “great game,” as the Defender said; here’s the box score and play-by-play, if you want to check it out.

 (Chicago Defender, June 2, 1923, page 10) 

This was game 2 of a four-game sweep by the American Giants that put them in first place.  These were the dates of the games:

May 26:  American Giants 3, Monarchs 2

May 27:  American Giants 5, Monarchs 4

May 28:  American Giants 3 (or 6; see below), Monarchs 2

May 29:  American Giants 7, Monarchs 4

The score of game 3 is listed in the box on the left side of the photograph as 3-2 American Giants.  The Chicago Defender agreed, printing a box score that showed it finishing 3-2.  The Chicago Tribune, however, gave the score as 6-2 Chicago.  Which score was correct?

Both, it turns out, depending on which rule you apply about walk-off home runs.  With the bases loaded, two out, and the score tied 2-2 in the bottom of the tenth, the Giants’ Harry Kenyon smashed a grand slam home run over the center field fence.  By the rule that pertained in the major leagues prior to 1920, teams that won in the bottom of the last inning could only win by one run.  So a batter who struck a game-winning hit was only awarded the hit necessary to get the winning run over the plate.  In Kenyon’s case, the Giants only needed one run to win, so under this rule he would be credited only with a single, enough to get Cristóbal Torriente from third to home.

Even though that rule had been eliminated by the major leagues in 1920, the Chicago Defender applied it to the May 28 game, and credited Kenyon only with the single (and only Torriente with the first run scored in the inning), giving the score as 3 to 2.  The Tribune, however, applied the rule in its modern form, and credited Kenyon with his home run, gave runs scored to Jim Brown, John Beckwith, and Kenyon, and put the score at 6 to 2.

(Chicago Defender, June 2, 1923, page 10)

 

(Chicago Daily Tribune, May 29, 1923, page 21)

pete hill and the 1904 philadelphia giants redux

Here is a much better image of the photo in this post, from the September 2, 1904, Philadelphia Inquirer:

And here is a detail of Pete Hill:

grant johnson at bat, 1910?

Here’s a cool photo sequence from the Detroit Free Press (November 17, 1910) showing scenes from the Detroit Tigers’ fall 1910 trip to Havana.

(click to enlarge)

Especially interesting is the leftmost photo, which purports to show Grant “Home Run” Johnson batting left-handed.  All sources I know about say he was a right-handed hitter, and all photos I’ve seen show him as such—though I don’t know of any in-game photos showing him actually at bat.  This photo has definitely not been inadvertently reversed, as Oscar Stanage was of course a right-handed catcher, and his glove is shown here on his left hand.  Unfortunately the printing-microfilming-digitizing sequence has so degraded the quality of what might have not been a very sharp photo in the first place that there’s no way to tell whether this is really Johnson, or maybe someone else on the Habana team, say Pete Hill or Carlos Morán, both left-handed hitters.

For what it’s worth, here are early photos of Hill and Johnson posing with bats (from the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 1905).  The photo of Johnson would later be reprinted in Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball—I don’t think I’ve seen the photo of Hill elsewhere.

I don’t think I have seen a photo of Carlos Morán batting, but here’s Pete Hill, actually at bat in a game for the Leland Giants vs. the Cuban Stars, probably in late June, 1909.

2624 wylie avenue

Last week I had the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. McDonald Williams, professor of English and son of Alexander McDonald Williams, the founder of the Negro National League’s Pittsburgh Keystones and builder of Central Baseball Park.  Among many other fascinating things Dr. Williams told me was the fact that I had unwittingly posted a photo of his house in 1931!

His father owned a bloc of four houses to the right of the grocery pictured here.  Going toward the right, the first house after the grocery was rented out; the second was occupied by the family of Rob Bailey, Dr. Williams’s uncle (his mother’s brother, who in fact had worked at Central Park); and the third house, 2624 Wylie, which would be barely visible on the right side in this photo, was the home of Alexander and Margaret Williams, and thus was one of Dr. Williams’s childhood homes.  The fourth house, which isn’t pictured here, was where Alexander’s younger brother Charles lived with his wife.

schenectady mohawk giants, 1913

Ran across this photo today, in the Schenectady Gazette (May 2, 1913).  Love the plaid warmup jackets.

From L to R: William Wernecke (owner), Jesse Bragg, Grant Johnson, Mike Brown, William T. Smith, Cyclone Joe Williams, Leroy Grant, Judy Gans, Phil Bradley (captain), and Johnny Pugh. 

This is just the roster at the beginning of the year; there would be plenty of changes through the season.  Williams, Johnson, and Gans would defect (back) to the Lincoln Giants within a few weeks of this photo; Frank Wickware, Chappie Johnson, Knucks James, and Walter Ball would later join the Mohawks.

earliest known photo of pete hill?

In honor of the dedication of Pete Hill’s historical marker in Buena, Virginia, here’s a photo of the 1904 Philadelphia Giants I ran across recently.  It was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on September 2, 1904, on the occasion of Rube Foster’s great victory over the Cuban X-Giants in the three-game series they played for the “Colored Championship of the World.”  (Foster’s 18 strikeouts, by the way, could be considered the all-time “Negro league” record, beating Satchel Paige’s 17 strikeouts against the Cuban Stars on April 29, 1929, though I suppose it depends on how you define “Negro league record.”)

The evidence suggests that 1904 was Pete Hill’s first full season in big-time black baseball (he had played for the Cuban X-Giants in Havana the previous fall), so this could be the earliest photo of Pete that we have.  Pete is in the middle row, second from left.

(Apologies again for the poor quality of this microfilmed-then-scanned image; I’m sure, or at least I hope, that actual prints of this picture exist somewhere.  I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen one, though.)

There’s another photo of the Philadelphia Giants floating around that’s commonly dated to 1904.  It can’t be, though, as Grant Johnson (top row, far left—the only player not identified in the handwriting on the photo) did not join the Giants until 1905—he was with the Cuban X-Giants in 1904.  In fact, Johnson only played for the Philadelphia Giants in 1905 (and for a short time in Cuba in the fall of 1907), so this photo certainly dates from 1905 rather than 1904.

UPDATE 6/16/2011  Here is a much better image of the 1904 photo.

alexander mcdonald williams

I’ve been in touch with McDonald Williams, the son of Alexander McDonald Williams, Barbadian immigrant, founder of the Negro National League’s Pittsburgh Keystones, and builder and owner of their home, Central Baseball Park.  Mr. Williams has been trying for several years, since before I started writing about the Keystones and Central Park, to get a state marker placed on the location of his father’s ballpark, which preceded Greenlee Field as a purpose-built park for black professional baseball by more than a decade.

Mr. Williams sent me a photograph of the Negro National League annual meeting held in Chicago on January 28, 1922, a picture I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else.

Neither Mr. Williams nor I can identify everybody in the photo yet, but here are some IDs for sure:

Back row, far left: Ira Lewis, a Pittsburgh Courier editor and secretary of the Pittsburgh Keystones.

Back row, sixth from left: Alexander Williams, Mr. Williams’s father, builder of Central Park and founder and president of the Pittsburgh Keystones.

Middle row, far left: Joe Green, owner/manager of the Chicago Giants.

Front row, far left: J. L. Wilkinson, owner of the Kansas City Monarchs.

Front row, third and fourth from left: Rube Foster and C. I. Taylor.

Based on photos from the Chicago Defender and Cleveland Gazette, I’ll hazard a couple of further guesses:

Back row, fourth from left: Sam Shepard, part of the St. Louis Stars’ ownership group (who were there fighting with representatives of the old St. Louis Giants for the league’s St. Louis franchise).

Back row, seventh from left (second from right, next to Alexander Williams): George J. Tate, owner of the Cleveland Tate Stars, and proprietor of another black-owned, purpose-built Negro league park, Tate Field.

Any additions to this list are welcome.

UPDATE 4/4/2011 Sadly, C. I. Taylor would be dead less than a month after this photo was taken (he passed away in Indianapolis on February 23).  He had just turned 47 on January 20.