agate type

rube vs. rube

“It was during this period [the early 1900s] that the nickname ‘Rube’ was attached to the young pitcher.  Legend has it that his teammates began calling him Rube after he defeated George E. (Rube) Waddell and the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-2, in a game in New York.”
    --Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White (1970), p. 107.

“By his own recollection, that’s the year [1902) he met and whipped the great Rube Waddell, who was 25-7 with the pennant-winning Athletics.  Other reports say the Waddell game was in 1903 or 1905.  No box score has yet been found.  However, since there was no Sunday baseball in those years, the Athletics were in the habit of playing exhibitions outside the city every Sunday, and it is not unlikely that they played Rube’s club on one or more of those occasions.”
    --John Holway, Blackball Stars (1988), p. 11.

“As a raw-talent rookie pitcher soon after the turn of the century, the big Texan was credited with 51 victories in 1902, including a win over the great Rube Waddell, the game in which Foster received his nickname.”
    --James Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (1994), p. 290.

“One postseason contest against the Athletics saw Foster go head-to-head against Connie Mack’s star southpaw, Rube Waddell.  Foster won 5-2, and as a consequence, he later recalled, ‘they gave me the name of the colored Rube Waddell’.  News accounts, starting in 1905, first began referring to the Philadelphia Giants’ ace as Rube Foster.”
    --Robert Cottrell, The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant (2001), p. 19.

 

Andrew Foster, it is said, acquired his nickname on the field of battle, defeating Rube Waddell and taking it from him in what sounds like some kind of ancient warrior ritual. As far as I can tell, nobody has identified the actual exhibition game against the Philadelphia Athletics, and accounts vary considerably about the year in which the legendary contest occurred, anywhere from 1902 to 1905.

I haven’t been able to find the game against the A’s either, though I wouldn’t rule it out (see Holway’s comment above).  The earliest example I’ve found of Foster himself telling the story of his nickname appears in an article by Frederick North Shorey in the September 14, 1907, issue of the Indianapolis Freeman.  Shorey quotes Foster saying, in part:

The order of the sentences kind of implies it took place in 1905, though I’d say it’s still more than a little ambiguous.  Phil Dixon doesn’t record any exhibition games between Waddell’s A’s and Foster’s Philadelphia Giants in his thorough account of the Giants’ 1905 season, though there are lots of blank spaces in October, and again, I wouldn’t rule it out. 

But Foster was called “Rube” before 1905.  The earliest example I’ve found so far is from the July 26, 1904, issue of the Trenton Evening Times, in a story about a game between the Philadelphia Giants and the Trenton YMCA:

So perhaps it took place earlier in 1904, or possibly in 1902 or 1903.  In 1902, Foster played for the Chicago Union Giants and a white semipro team in Otsego, Michigan; so far, I haven’t found any indication that either of these teams ever faced Rube Waddell, though my search has hardly been exhaustive.  In 1903 Foster joined the Cuban X Giants on the east coast.  I haven’t found them playing the Philadelphia A’s yet, but there is this, from July 28, 1903:

(New York Evening World, July 28, 1903, p. 8)

The Murray Hills were a fairly prominent Manhattan semipro team managed at the time by Nat Strong.  And the following Sunday (August 2) they did indeed meet the Cuban X Giants at Olympia Field (see below), with Foster on the mound for the Giants, vs. “Wilson” for the Murray Hills.

(New York Sun, August 3, 1903, p. 6)

It happens that Charles Dryden of the Philadelphia North American, one of the most famous baseball writers in the country, wrote up an account of this game.  I haven’t seen the original, but a passage from it was quoted a couple of days later in the Pittsburg Press:

(Pittsburg Press, August 5, 1903, p. 10)

The Philadelphia Athletics were in town to play the Highlanders, but at that time Sunday baseball was illegal in New York, so Waddell spent the enforced day off pitching as “Wilson” for the semipro Murray Hills in an illicit game (although results were still reported in some newspapers) against Andrew Foster of the Cuban X Giants.  Waddell struck out 12 but was dinged for 11 or 12 hits, while Foster scattered 7 hits and won, 6 to 3.  At one point Foster hit Waddell in the head, to the apparent entertainment of the crowd.  Later a foul tip from Waddell supposedly hit a fan and ignited a box of matches in his pocket, setting his clothes on fire.

On the top of that, this game appears to be the only documented instance of Foster pitching against Waddell.  Even though it was against the Murray Hills and not the Athletics, and the score was 6 to 3 and not 5 to 2, it seems to me quite possible that this was the game that led to Foster being forever after known as Rube.

Some closing notes:

• I still think it’s not unlikely that Foster was really called Rube because he was a new arrival in the North from rural Texas, and that the story that it came from his victory over Waddell is a case of retconning.

• You’d think that Nat Strong and the Murray Hills would have wanted it known widely that Waddell was pitching for them that Sunday.  This would be complicated by the blue laws, obviously, and by the fact that Connie Mack would probably have frowned on his star pitcher throwing nine innings on his off day.  So I’m wondering what kind of guerrilla marketing techniques Nat Strong used to evade detection by the authorities but still pull in a good crowd.

• The address given for Olympia Field (135th St. and Lenox Avenue) was only a long block away from the address later commonly given for Olympic Field (136th St. and Fifth Avenue), eventually the home of the New York Lincoln Giants.  I don’t know if they were really the same ballpark, or related in some way.

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)

leland giants vs. cap anson

The man who famously refused to play against black players, mostly Fleet Walker, on multiple occasions in the 1880s, and has often been charged with a high degree of responsibility for the formation of baseball’s color line, ran a semipro team in Chicago in the 1900s that played against black teams quite frequently.  And he sometimes suited up with the team himself, well into his 50s. 

So, to answer the obvious question, yes, Cap Anson did play against African American teams.   Here is a box score for one such game, played on August 22, 1908, showing a 56-year-old Anson taking the field against Walter Ball, Pete Hill, Harry Moore, and the rest of the Leland Giants:

How did baseball’s most notorious racist before Ty Cobb come to swallow his objections to racially-integrated baseball?  Who knows, since to my knowledge he never said anything about it himself—but I’d guess four possible reasons:

1. He changed his views, or at least mellowed a bit with age;
2. He didn’t think it was such a big deal away from the major leagues;
3. As proprietor of a semipro club, he realized that games with black clubs were his biggest draw, largely because they were by far the most talented opponents the semipros could book on a regular basis;
4. He thought that his own appearance against black clubs would attract fans who were aware of his reputation, and might have expected something crazy to happen.

It’s likely some combination of these factors, with number 3 probably the most important, in my opinion.

And of course there is this photograph.  I don’t actually know the story behind this (if there is one). 

This picture, by the way, is one piece of evidence (among many) that Rube Foster wasn’t six feet tall (see comments on this post).  Anson was supposed to be six feet tall himself, and he’s clearly taller than Foster here.  Unless Anson was standing on something (I don’t think I’ve seen a larger version of the photo) or his commonly listed height was wrong and he was really 6’3” or 6’4” or something, Foster was, on the evidence of this photo, probably a few inches under six feet.  More on this in a future post.

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.

schorling park, chicago 1925

Here’s an image I’m not sure I’ve seen before, of Schorling Park during an American Giants’ game in the mid-1920s.  It can be found at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery, and comes originally from John Taitt’s Souvenir of Negro Progress: Chicago, 1779-1925.

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.

josé del valle méndez

When Patrick Rock and I were searching for Negro Leaguers and Cuban ballplayers with World War I draft cards, one player we didn’t find at the time was José Méndez—even though he was in the United States in September, 1918, when a man of his age would have been required to register, citizen or not.  At the time he was playing for the Chicago American Giants, having been brought in to replace the shortstop Bobby Williams, lost to the draft.  (This was during the period when Méndez did very little pitching, and made his living as an infielder.)

I’ve continued research on the World War I cards over the past year, making occasional finds, but Méndez was always a low priority, as I assumed we pretty much knew everything there was to know about him.  Then, a few weeks ago, it dawned on me that I had seen several full names given for him:

“José Méndez Ramos,” from a roster list published in La Lucha (January 26, 1912);

“José de la Caridad Méndez Arco de Tejada,” from Roberto González Echevarría’s The Pride of Havana (p. 130);

“José Méndez Baez,” from James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 545).

“José de la Caridad Méndez Baez,” from his Hall of Fame plaque.

So I went looking for Méndez in the World War I draft again, to see what name he used there.  Of the 211 men named José Méndez who registered, only three lived in Chicago.  Of them, two were listed as white (one a Mexican citizen); the other, the only black man named José Méndez to register for the draft in Chicago, was this one:

                                    (click to enlarge)

So we have José del Valle Méndez, born January 2, 1885, whereas the official birthdate for the Hall of Famer José Méndez is March 19, 1887. He is listed as “negro” and a Cuban citizen.  His occupation, cigar maker, is in fact the one tradition assigns Méndez (see González Echevarría, p. 131), and one that’s given for him on some early passenger lists to the United States (in 1910 traveling with the Stars of Cuba, for example).  He is not listed as a professional ballplayer, but then neither were José Méndez’s teammates Pete Hill and Bruce Petway, who registered on the same day in the same city and who had been professionals for many years (both Hill and Petway listed themselves as civilian workers for the Army, as it happens).  General Crowder’s “work or fight” order had classified sports as a non-essential occupation and led to the suspension of organized baseball on September 2.  Independent and semipro baseball continued (Hill, Petway, and Méndez were all playing for the American Giants on days surrounding the September 12 registration day), but the players who had to register at that time often (though not always) put other occupations (as did some major league players, for example Burt Shotton, Hal Chase, and Jack Coombs).

José del Valle Méndez may have been a cigarmaker, but his employer looks very much like…Rube Foster.  The microfilm from which the Ancestry.com scan was made, however, was flawed and streaked, so it could be “Robt. Foster,” or something else.  The employer’s address is 3242 Vernon Ave., although the “Vernon” is obscured by another streak.  Rube Foster’s address on that same date (September 12, 1918), as well as in the 1920 census, was 3242 Vernon Avenue.

                                    (click to enlarge)

Returning to the Méndez card, it appears that in the box reserved for checking one’s “native born” status, he wrote “Cardenas, Cuba,” probably misunderstanding the purpose of the box.  Cárdenas, of course, is where José Méndez was born.

(I love it, btw, that Méndez’s physical condition is, like the werewolf’s hair, pronounced “perfect.”)

So, what do you think?  If my interpretation of the handwriting on the card is correct (it would be immensely useful to see the actual card), and this José Méndez worked for Rube Foster at 3242 Vernon Avenue, Chicago, then we have both a different birthdate and a different name for Méndez than any we have seen before—and in his own handwriting, which would grant it a particular authority.

UPDATE 8:06 p.m. I think I can add another strong point in favor of José del Valle Méndez being our man.  On the card his nearest relative is one “Marcelina del Valle,” living on Factoria street in Havana.  José Méndez’s mother, as evidenced by a number of passenger lists on which she was listed as his relative or contact in Cuba, was named Marcelina, and in 1917 at least she lived at No. 38 Factoria street in Havana.  Her name was evidently Marcelina Méndez Lugones; she appears under both last names and also at least once as “M. Mendez Lugones.”

where was rube foster really born?

I’ve been following up on Kevin Johnson’s discovery of Rube Foster as one of many subjects interviewed in a sociological study of Chicago’s African American population after the Chicago race riot of 1919.  Foster apparently named La Grange, Texas, as his birthplace, rather than Calvert, where he grew up, and where everyone says he was born.  As I said, this would seem to be a highly credible source, and La Grange is a perfectly reasonable alternative to Calvert.

Let’s trace Rube back through a few official records.  Here is his World War I draft card, showing the commonly accepted birth date of September 17, 1879, though no birth place is given, unfortunately.

Here is a record in the 1900 census, showing the Foster family living in Calvert, Robertson County, Texas.  The father, Andrew Foster, is listed as a “Preacher.”  The younger Andrew’s birthdate is September, 1879.  His mother’s name is Evaline (pace James Riley, who mistakenly calls Rube’s mother “Sarah,” which was actually his wife’s name)—she is listed as having had six children, only four of them living.  Also living with the family is an older sister, “Christana,” born in January 1878, and a younger brother, Johnson, born in January 1884.  The children and father were born in Texas, the mother in Mississippi.  The parents had been married for 27 years (since 1873).

In the 1880 census, which was taken when Rube Foster was an infant, I can’t find the Fosters in Robertson County.  However, there is this family, living in Winchester, Texas, a small, unincorporated town in Fayette County, probably 15 miles or less from La Grange*:

We have Andy Foster, 29, living with wife Eveline (both are listed as born in Mississippi) and children Willie (not the Hall of Famer, Rube’s half-brother, of course, who would not be born for another 23 years), 5, Gertrude, 4, Christina, 2, and—“Bishop,” eight months old, born in September, 1879.  The family was enumerated on June 10, 1880, so if this child was born on September 17, Rube Foster’s birthday, the age is precise--he would not turn nine months old until June 17.

So, was Rube Foster born “Bishop Foster”?  Maybe.  It could be some sort of mistake by the census taker, but it seems like an unlikely mistake, being a rather unusual name.  Of course, it could be that there were really four children, and the enumerator erroneously put down only three, sloppily combining an older child’s name with a younger child’s birth date.

Or—“Bishop Foster” could be Rube Foster.  He might have been renamed while still an infant, which happened with some frequency in the nineteenth century.  Or perhaps Bishop was his middle name, which the family stopped using after a while, and which Foster himself replaced with his nickname, Rube, as an adult.

With the information we have, we can’t know for sure.  But the 1900 family is surely Rube Foster’s, and the 1880 family both resembles the 1900 one in every particular, and happens to be located very near La Grange, which Charles Spurgeon Johnson reports as Rube Foster’s birthplace.

These are pretty small things—perhaps a different birth place than we thought, perhaps a twist regarding his name we didn’t know about.  They don’t change anything we already understand about Foster’s life, achievements, character, etc.  But there are those of us who like to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.

*--Zoom out to see the distance between Winchester and La Grange.

Mr. G—, baseball “magnate”

Kevin Johnson sent along this amazing find, from Google Books.  The Negro in Chicago: A Study in Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922) was a sociological study overseen by Charles Spurgeon Johnson.  It was researched under the auspices of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in the wake of the July 1919 riots in Chicago.  In addition to the statistics, Johnson includes profiles of a number of pseudonymous African Americans in Chicago.  See if you can guess who “Mr. G—” is…

By the way: Foster reports here that he was born in La Grange, Texas, rather than Calvert, where he grew up.  La Grange is in Fayette County, not too far from Calvert.  I would tend to view this source as pretty credible.

foster and méndez, 1924 world series

Regarding the decisive Game 10 of the 1924 World Series, in which the Monarchs’ 37-year-old player-manager José Méndez made a surprise start and shut out Hilldale on three hits despite suffering from a “viral infection” (Larry Lester, Baseball’s First Colored World Series, p. 175), John Holway wrote the following:

In the final game the Monarch manager, 38-year-old Jose Mendez, one of Cuba’s greatest pitchers 15 years earlier, had no one left to start on the mound.  “Well, Darling,” Foster smiled, “how do you feel yourself?”  Mendez gulped.  “If you say so,” he said, “I do it.”  Foster called every pitch for him from the bench and Mendez hurled a three-hitter to beat young Holsey “Scrip” Lee 5-0, and take the series. (Blackball Stars, p. 32)

I’d always thought this story sounded somewhat unlikely, given that Méndez was himself the veteran of many big games and hardly seemed the type to “gulp” at the prospect of a high-pressure situation.  I suspected (though of course without knowing for sure) that it emanated from Foster himself.  I haven’t checked every contemporary newspaper thoroughly to see if this story, or some hint of it, made it into print at the time.  But I did just run across this passage in the Philadelphia Tribune (November 22, 1924), from an article entitled “‘Rube’ Foster Comments on the World’s Series”:

So Foster himself didn’t claim it was his idea for Méndez to start, nor did he claim to have called pitches the whole game.  And I’m pretty sure that, had those things really happened, Foster would not have hesitated to take credit for them.

It’s entirely possible that there’s some truth to it: maybe, for instance, Méndez consulted Foster about how to pitch to certain Hilldale hitters.  This, of course, is hardly the same thing that the original story claims.  Plus it’s not clear that Foster would have known the Hilldale lineup all that much better than Méndez; two of the starting lineup that day had been teammates of Méndez’s recently (George Carr with the Monarchs, 1920-1922, and Frank Warfield with Santa Clara in the previous winter’s Cuban League).  Warfield, Clint Thomas, and Biz Mackey had all played in the NNL for multiple seasons fairly recently, so Méndez would have had as much chance to see them as Foster.  Maybe Foster would have known more about his fellow Texans Louis Santop and George Johnson.  On the whole though, the notion that Foster babysat Méndez through the Series-clinching victory is probably exaggerated.