Agate Type

Claudio Manela

Here’s an artistic rendering of the Filipino lefty Claudio Manela, who played in the Negro National League, Cuban League, and Eastern League in the early 1920s—to my knowledge the only Negro leaguer born in the Philippines. It’s by LeRoid David, a Sacramento artist and baseball fan with a strong interest in Filipino ballplayers in America.

It’s based on the one quite blurry photograph of Manela that has circulated on the web—LeRoid has imagined the details of what Manela might have really looked like. Here’s the original:

Thanks to LeRoid for sharing!

Looking at the Seamheads DB master file, here are the birthplaces of Negro league players (that is, players for Black professional teams in the U.S.) known to have been born outside the continental United States:

Bahamas: 1 (Ormond Sampson)
Canada: 3 (Jimmy Claxton, Bill Galloway, Red Eagle Smith)
Cuba: 270
Dominican Republic: 8
Jamaica: 1 (Oscar Levis)
Liberia: 1 (James Wilson)
Panama: 12
Philippines: 1 (Claudio Manela)
Puerto Rico: 25
Spain: 1 (Alfredo Cabrera)
U.S. Virgin Islands: 1 (Alphonso Gerard)
Venezuela: 1 (Carlos Ascanio)

Among team officials and others, Alexander McDonald Williams of the Pittsburgh Keystones and Central Baseball Park was born in Barbados, and Stanislaus Kostka Govern of the Cuban Giants and New York Gorhams was born in the then-Danish West Indies (later the U.S. Virgin Islands).

Sol White's Official Base Ball Guide: New Cover

This year has seen the re-release of my edition of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide by Summer Games Books. It’s worth getting an actual paper copy of the book, as it sports a new cover by the great baseball artist Gary Cieradkowski.

Be sure to check out Gary’s account of how he created the cover, as a nod to other vintage baseball guide covers.

The 1926 Cleveland Elites

(Chicago Defender, May 29, 1926, p. 10)

The above shows the 1926 Cleveland Elites and their bus. Aside from its interest as a photograph of a quite obscure team, it is also one of the earlier images I have seen of a Negro league team bus.

The Elites unfortunately did not amount to much—the owner Sam Shepard, a former St. Louis Stars owner, hired Candy Jim Taylor, former Stars manager, to run the new team, but Taylor couldn’t replicate his success in St. Louis. He used at least 37 players trying to come up with a winning formula, but wound up quitting and going to Detroit before the season was done. Cleveland finished 8-40-1 in league competition. (Amazingly that was not the worst record in the league—the Dayton Marcos finished 6-36 to beat out their fellow Ohioans for last-place honors in the very lopsided 1926 NNL.)

Although on the diamond the Elites were way behind the league, on the roads and highways they were leading the pack. As the caption indicates, the multi-talented Shepard designed the Elites’ bus himself, as well as that of the champion Kansas City Monarchs. (Incidentally, while there are many photos of Monarchs buses from the 1930s and later, I don’t think I’ve seen one from the 1920s.)

The 1920s were the decade when Negro league teams switched from trains to buses. This gave them vastly more flexibility. It was once common for games to be curtailed or the second games of doubleheaders cancelled so one or both teams could catch a train. If they could jump on their own bus right after the game teams could stay an extra few hours if necessary—or at least that was the idea. With more control over the travel schedule, team owners found it easier to book more and more games—and the season became even more hectic and exhausting for the players.

UPDATE 11/2/2020 Here is an item from a week earlier about Sam Shepard and the Elites team bus:

(Chicago Defender, May 22, 1926, p. 10)

Also, with respect to the discussion in the comments about the size of the Elites roster: there were roster limits in the NNL. Teams were usually expected to keep no more than 16 players, though this varied a bit, and enforcement of the rule was not always strict. Sometimes teams were content with less—for example, the Cuban Stars used only 13 players over their whole 1926 NNL schedule.

The Elites definitely kept around a large number of players, and Candy Jim Taylor made use of them, with lots of relief pitching, in-game substitutions, pinch-hitters, and pinch-runners. It seemed to be a mixture of cycling through a high volume of players in the hopes of finding some talent while desperately seeking for any possible advantage within a given game.

Here’s a box score for a game played on May 31, a few days after the bus photo was published, showing the Elites using 17 players, including Taylor and Frank Duncan, the veteran player-coach who briefly took over as manager later in the year.

(St. Louis Argus, June 4, 1926, p. 7)

For whatever reason, nothing worked at all—the Elites were trounced in this game 11 to 1, finished with 8 wins and 40 losses in league competition, and folded before the season was over. Taylor finished the year with Detroit, then returned to St. Louis in 1927, eventually leading the Stars to a pennant in 1928.

Koke Alexander

Here’s an update on a player who has been something of a mystery, “Koke” Alexander of the Dayton Marcos and other teams in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

First, I ran across a photo of him playing for Dayton’s Colored Men’s Improvement Association team in 1922. He’s in the middle, with Samuel Dewitt, another player I’ve never seen an image of, on the left, and Will Owens on the right:

(Dayton Herald, July 1, 1922, p. 8)

Unfortunately, I think these images are not really good enough to use on the Seamheads site.

A number of Black men named Alexander lived in Dayton around this time. The two I always thought were the likeliest candidates to be the ballplayer were:

1) Julius Forrest Alexander, manager of an “athletic club” according to his WW1 draft card,  proprietor of an “amusement club” according to the 1920 census, and later (in 1928) the sponsor of a baseball team called the Dayton Independents. He was born in 1886, though, so was possibly a little old to be a professional ballplayer on the side. Also Koke Alexander moved to the Columbus Buckeyes and Chicago Giants for the 1921 season—it would seem unlikely that the owner of a club would leave his business to go play ball for a couple of second division teams. While Koke was appreciated as a good player in both Dayton and Chicago, he was hardly a star, and probably wasn’t pulling down a large paycheck.

2) Luther Cornileus Alexander, who worked as a sandblast operator in an iron foundry. “Coke” is a form of coal used as fuel in an iron-producing blast furnace; this seems as good an explanation for Koke’s nickname as any. Also, Luther was born in 1893, making him aged 25 through 28 during Koke’s top flight career.

However, some time ago I found a more solid lead than either of these (very speculative) possibilities—an entry in the 1921 Dayton City Directory:

This doesn’t seem to match any white ballplayer I can find. Moreover, Dayton didn’t have a white league team in 1920 or 1921, but of course the Dayton Marcos, featuring Koke Alexander, played in the Negro National League in 1920.

As it turns out, there was a Black man named Alfred Alexander who filled out a draft card in Dayton in 1917:

Born in 1888, he’s a little older than I would have expected, though it is certainly possible he was really younger than this—it’s very common to find earlier birthdates on World War I draft cards than in other records. I have tried to track him down in other records, including in his birth state of North Carolina, with no luck so far, so he remains a little mysterious. But this is I think the best lead I’ve come up with.

John Henry Lloyd & the Georgia Rabbit

In the past I have made the case (here and here, and in my edition of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide) that deadball era pitcher Walter Ball was mistakenly credited with a nickname, “The Georgia Rabbit,” and given the wrong full name—George Walter Ball—as a result of a pair of punctuation errors, twenty years apart, in two quotations from Sol White. Briefly put, Walter Thomas Ball was accidentally combined with a different pitcher, previously unknown to researchers: George Washington, a.k.a. the Georgia Rabbit, who pitched for the Cuban X-Giants and Philadelphia Giants, and who collapsed and died of cardiac arrest before a Philadelphia Giants game in Connecticut in 1908.

The other day I ran across a this 1919 item from Cary B. Lewis’s column “Around the Diamond” (Chicago Defender, March 1, 1919). It’s one of the earlier versions in print of the familiar story about a young John Henry Lloyd repurposing a wire basket as a catcher’s mask.

I had certainly seen this item before, but hadn’t remembered that, when he was hit by the two foul tips that swelled both his eyes shut, Lloyd was catching none other than “the famous twirler ‘Georgia Rabbit’.”

This story has them playing for the Macon Stars in 1907. My guess is that it probably took place a couple of years earlier, as in 1907 Lloyd was with the Cuban X-Giants and Washington was with the Philadelphia Giants. Lloyd joined the X-Giants in July of 1906—interestingly, Washington had pitched for them earlier that same year, in May, though as far as I can tell they didn’t play for the X-Giants at the same time.

White Racial Violence & the Negro Leagues: The Chicago Riot of 1919

The following is a piece I wrote for the Outsider Baseball Bulletin nearly ten years ago (September 8, 2010), presented with a few slight edits and updates.

On a hot July day in 1919 the Chicago American Giants disposed easily of the upstart Detroit Stars, 7 to 1, in Detroit’s Navin Field, while the Tigers were away in Cleveland. Meanwhile, roughly around the time the game ended (5 p.m.), the 29th Street Beach on the South Side back in Chicago was packed with people from the city’s varied ethnic neighborhoods. “Racial feeling,” the Chicago Tribune would report the next day, “had been on a par with the weather,” and it “took fire” when a black teenager named Eugene Williams, floating on a raft, strayed into a section of the beach that was informally regarded as white territory. White men shouted at him and began throwing stones; one of them, George Stauber, was especially persistent, and succeeded in knocking Williams off his raft. Whites on the beach on the beach actively obstructed black swimmers from going to his rescue. Williams, evidently panicking, drowned.

Cartoon by John T. McCutcheon (Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1919)

Despite the entreaties of indignant African Americans, a cop on the scene refused to arrest Stauber. Scuffles and fights spread along 29th Street and into the city, and in less than half an hour the whole “Black Belt” section of Chicago was aflame with interracial violence. Over the next several days waves of fighting surged and subsided, as roving gangs of white vigilantes, many of them members of neighborhood athletic clubs, pulled black commuters from trolleys and beat them, shot people from cars, looted black-owned businesses, and set fire to houses. Future mayor-for-life Richard Daley, at the time a member of the Hamburg Athletic Club, may have been one of the instigators, though nobody has proven that. Police reserves, and eventually the Illinois National Guard, were called out. The latter occupied the American Giants’ Schorling Park, which was situated squarely in the middle of the riot-torn area. In the end the official toll was 38 dead (15 white, 23 black), and hundreds of all races and ethnicities injured.

In Detroit, the players may have heard of the disturbances from friends or relatives Sunday evening (although there were reports of telephone and power lines being cut on the South Side). Rube Foster and the Chicago sportswriters Dave Wyatt and Cary B. Lewis were guests of honor at a dinner put on that evening by the Detroit Stars owner, Tenny Blount. Rube, the Chicago Defender later reported, was “so happy over his two victories that he ate a whole five-pound steak.” Whether or not the dinner was interrupted by news of events in Chicago is unknown.

In any case, Rube, Wyatt, Lewis, and the players would definitely have gotten the news when they picked up the morning papers to check out the story about the previous day’s game. “Race Riots Spread Over Negro Belt of Chicago,” proclaimed the front page of the Detroit Free Press. The first line of the accompanying story told of “a Negro” who was “found probably fatally wounded late tonight at Thirty-ninth and Halsted streets,”—only a few blocks west of Schorling Park, which was on 39th Street between Princeton and Wentworth avenues—with a bullet wound in his chest. The article went on to tell of three other black people who were “dragged off street cars” and beaten at the same corner; all three suffered fractured skulls.

A photograph of white rioters, some clutching bricks, searching for a black man; from The Negro in Chicago: A Study in Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922). This is the first in a sequence; two further photographs show the rioters throwing bricks at a prone man and then his lifeless body being examined by police.

Most of the American Giants players with known addresses lived somewhere in the “Black Belt,” on streets like Wabash, Michigan, or Indiana avenues. Rube Foster’s longtime home was at 3242 Vernon Avenue, just a few blocks from the 29th Street beach where Eugene Williams was killed and only a block and a half from one of the major disturbances. And of course the majority of the Detroit Stars, as former American Giants players, had Chicago connections. Three of them would still appear in the 1920 census (taken the following January) living in Chicago: Pete Hill, Bruce Petway, and José Méndez. Had Hill moved his wife Gertrude and their nearly 10-year-old son Kenneth to Detroit for the summer—or was he thinking of them, back in Chicago, locked in their Wabash Avenue residence while smoke and gunshots filled the streets, as he took the field at Mack Park on Monday afternoon?

Map of the riot area (Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1919).

Whatever their personal feelings, the teams had a seven-game series to play. This was their livelihood, ticket sales were booming, and the show had to go on. The American Giants tempted fate by sending outfielder Cristóbal Torriente to the mound, though perhaps Foster reasoned that as a southpaw Torriente was a good choice in Mack Park, with its short right field porch. Whatever he thought, he lost the gamble. In the third inning Méndez started a rally with “the longest hit of the day,” a blast that hit a tree in the outfield and fell in for a double. His teammates teed off on Torriente for three more triples in that inning. Three Detroit players—Hill, Frank Warfield, and the pitcher, Dicta Johnson—hit two triples apiece in the 13 to 5 rout.

The box score appeared on Tuesday morning in a Detroit Free Press that headlined its front page, “Troops Lent To Stop Chicago War As Mobs Kill 7.” That afternoon John Donaldson, “in rare form” for Detroit, held the Giants to six hits as both Hill and the normally light-hitting Méndez homered to give the Stars a 7 to 3 win.

According to the next morning’s Free Press, “Negroes Fleeing Chicago As Fury of Battle Increases.” Many of the players doubtless read the lengthy accounts that followed of smashed street lamps and gunfights in the dark, police phone lines overwhelmed by calls from lone women trapped in their houses and too terrified to step out, white mobs attacking the (black) Provident Hospital where an endless stream of wounded and maimed people had flowed for the past three days. Whatever they thought of it, the teams played on. And the Stars won their third straight, another handy victory, 8 to 5, featuring Pete Hill’s 18th homer, another triple by Warfield, and a bases-loaded double by Candy Jim Taylor after Hill had been intentionally walked.

Members of the black community evacuating a riot-damaged home while guarded by the state militia. From The Negro in Chicago (1922).

As the riots in Chicago rumbled on, the Stars won a slugfest on July 31, 12 to 8. Five home runs were hit by left-handed hitters, including a grand slam by Donaldson. Detroit now led the current series four games to two, and had succeeded in tying the season series at five apiece. After a day off on August 1, the Stars won their fifth straight on Saturday, August 2, 10 to 6, Hill getting his 19th home run. The scheduled seven-game series was completed, the unheralded Stars winning five games to two. The Hilldale club of Philadelphia was arriving in Detroit the next day, and the American Giants had been due back in Chicago for a seven-game series against the rejuvenated Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, a team that now featured superstars (and former American Giants) John Henry Lloyd and Cannonball Dick Redding.

But Schorling Park was now occupied by the state militia. The Bacharachs cancelled their whole western trip, and the American Giants were stuck in Detroit. With three major black teams in the same city, a three-corned double-header was arranged for Sunday, August 3. In the opener the American Giants, behind Dick Whitworth, ended Detroit’s streak with an authoritative 9 to 1 win.

The situation in Chicago was beginning to wind down, devolving into cleanups and investigations. Fires in nearby Polish and Lithuanian neighborhoods, originally reported to have been set by black rioters, were now thought to have been set by “white malcontents and anti-Negro agitators…working with blackened faces, to throw suspicion upon their racial adversaries” (Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919). The Black Belt was now largely cordoned off, and relief trucks brought in supplies of food and milk. In the meantime Foster in Detroit was being presented with a new car by the Maxwell Automobile Company, sponsors of a white semipro team that played an extensive schedule against the best blackball teams in 1919, “in appreciation of his character as a ballplayer and a business man.”

One of the fires set by white rioters wearing blackface. From The Negro in Chicago (1922).

It’s unclear now what Foster and the American Giants did for the next few days. It seems quite likely that they may have returned to Chicago while the Stars took on Hilldale. Three American Giants players—Oscar Charleston, Bill Francis, and Tom Johnson—stayed behind to bolster the Stars as they turned back Ed Bolden’s club, three games to two. With his home field unusable for the near future, Foster arranged for a lengthy tour in the East. It kicked off with one last two-game series between the Stars and American Giants in Mack Park on Saturday and Sunday, August 9 and 10. The two teams were knotted at six apiece for the season, so this would decide bragging rights for the season between the two premier African-American teams in the Midwest.

The first game broke the pattern of the series. The elongated and now obscure, but very effective, right-hander String Bean Williams shackled the Stars and their left-handed power in Mack Park, holding them to two hits (one a double by Pete Hill) in a tight 2 to 1 victory. This gave the Giants a 7 to 6 edge on Detroit; the Stars now had one last chance to end on even terms with their rivals. The second game pitted Tom Johnson, who had been loaned to Detroit for the Hilldale series but was now back with Chicago, against Sam Crawford, the Stars’ ace. Jesse Barber, the first batter up for the Giants, lofted the ball over the right field fence, and Foster’s men never looked back, ending up 5 to 3 winners, and closing out the season series at 8 to 6 in their favor.

The 1919 Detroit Stars. L to R: Dicta Johnson, Frank Warfield, Joe Hewitt, Frank Duncan, Pete Hill, José Méndez, Tenny Blount, Edgar Wesley, Vicente Rodríguez, John Donaldson, Bruce Petway, Frank Wickware, Sam Crawford

The Detroit Stars, for their part, didn’t lose another game to a major black team that year, closing with a four-game sweep of the Dayton Marcos and two wins against the Cuban Stars in December. The American Giants embarked on a month-long odyssey through Pittsburgh (where a series with the Cuban Stars was disrupted by a streetcar strike), Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and Dayton. (Foster never did come to an agreement with John Connor, owner of the Bacharach Giants, so the two teams didn’t meet in 1919.) Finally, to much anticipation, the American Giants returned home for their first game in Schorling Park in six weeks, a matchup with the Cuban Stars on August 31. “A great demonstration awaits the American Giants,” wrote the Defender, calling them “true warriors.” To bring home the connection between martial pride, self-respect, and sports, James Smith, a former player, sportswriter, and “winner of hero medals in France,” was to be presented at the game with a special award paid for by fans. The team’s homecoming felt like a celebration of the black community’s survival.

Black community members & militia. From The Negro in Chicago (1922).

The 1919 Chicago riot was only part of a wave of racial disturbances that swept the nation during the war years and immediately after, culminating in the horrific Tulsa massacre of 1921 (dramatized in HBO's Watchmen), where vigilantes dropped explosives from biplanes and the black section of town was almost completely destroyed, leaving 10,000 people homeless. The “Chicago war” was not the only such incident to affect black professional baseball: the East St. Louis disturbances in 1917, when between 100 and 150 black people were killed by rioting white workers, seems to have driven Charlie Mills’s St. Louis Giants out of business for two years, as white owners of ballparks apparently refused to accommodate them.

The Negro National League, founded in February 1920, was finally possible only because the black populations of cities like Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City had swelled enormously in just a few years. Ironically, the same conditions that underpinned the outburst in interracial violence—the Great Migration of African Americans to the industrial cities of the North during World War I—also paved the way for the great dream of black baseball pioneers to become a reality.

The 1919 Chicago American Giants. Top row, L to R: Bingo DeMoss, Leroy Grant, Dave Brown, Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Dick Whitworth. Middle row, L to R: Dave Malarcher (?), Bobby Williams (?), George Dixon, Johnny Reese (?). Bottom row, L to R: unknown, Jimmie Lyons, Bill Francis, unknown, Jim Brown (?).

Cigars against the Kaiser

(Chicago Defender, August 24, 1918)

While researching the other day’s post on black baseball and the 1918 flu pandemic I ran across this photo montage in my files, showing several of the Chicago American Giants in 1918: Dick Whitworth and Rube Foster in the top photo, and George Dixon, José Méndez, and Frank Wickware across the bottom. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone post or reprint this anywhere.

In that post I mentioned how the “work or fight” rule led players like Bruce Petway and Pete Hill to find work in an “essential” industry, in their cases as civilian employees of the U.S. Army (the Quartermaster Corps), which you can find recorded on their draft cards.

 

Cubans like José Méndez who were residing in the United States also had to register for the draft. Whether or not the work or fight rule applied to them, I don’t know. In any case Méndez, who was a professional baseball player and had been for more than a decade, listed himself as a cigar maker, with Rube Foster as his employer. Maybe the cigar industry was considered vital to the war effort?

Black Baseball & The 1918 Pandemic

Ted Kimbro of the St. Louis Giants and Pearl Webster of the Brooklyn Royal Giants, both in 1916.

As the 1918 baseball season entered its stretch run, the military draft and the government’s “work or fight” order were putting heavy pressures on black professional teams. With several of their players gone to the service the Indianapolis A.B.C.s disbanded in late August. Meanwhile in Chicago Rube Foster, despite also having lost a number of performers, decided to soldier on.

In part Foster was led to this decision because white semipro baseball teams, staffed by players who worked in essential industries, were enjoying what Dave Wyatt in the Chicago Defender called “the greatest run of prosperity that it has undergone in years” (“A.B.C.’s Have Disbanded,” August 31, 1918). “Pikers beware,” he wrote three weeks later, “there are any number of high class National and American league players who…have employment considered essential and the industries furnishing such work have baseball teams” (“Beloit Returns to Wrest Championship From American Giants,” September 21, 1918). The American Giants thus had plenty of opponents who could attract fans. When the Cubs/Red Sox World Series (played entirely in September after the regular season was shut down early) ended with a Boston victory on September 11, Foster’s team became the main sports attraction in Chicago.

Wyatt explained (September 14, 1918) that Foster’s players also dealt with the work or fight order by seeking “essential” employment, thus obtaining draft deferrals or low classifications that would make them unlikely to be drafted. Pete Hill and Bruce Petway, for example, both found work as civilian employees of the U.S. Army Quartermasters Corps.

But a quieter, more insidious enemy was stalking baseball (and the world). Wyatt opened an article in the October 19 issue of the Defender this way:

“With old Jack Frost and his hellish cohorts influenza, pneumonia, colds and chills hurling all sorts of bombs our way, a few thousand of the loyal and brave devotees of baseball swooped down upon Schorling Park and demanded the unconditional surrender of the venerable old Jack.”

Of course you can’t defeat a pandemic by crowding together into a baseball park. The game Wyatt was writing about—a 7-to-0 win by the American Giants over a white all-star team—was the American Giants’ last contest for the season. On October 12 the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health issued an order closing theaters, dance halls, and other “places of public amusement” and banning “all public gatherings of a social nature, not essential to the conduct of the war.” “INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC CLOSES BASEBALL SEASON,” declared the Defender on November 2, 1918. Rube Foster had to cancel a game that would have pitted his American Giants against a white semipro team starring Jim “Hippo” Vaughn, who had pitched for the Cubs in the recent World Series.

Partly due to the fact that baseball was entering its offseason just as the pandemic took off, there was not a lot of contemporary commentary about the disease in relation to the Negro leagues, at least not that I could find.  Remarkably, given that tens of millions (possibly as many as 100 million) died worldwide of the so-called Spanish flu, to my knowledge only two likely victims of the pandemic were connected to black baseball. Both contracted the illness in the military.

 

Dan Kennard, Ted Kimbro, McKinley Downs, and George Brown of the 1915 West Baden Sprudels. This is a detail from a larger photo sent to me by Kim Agan.

Born in St. Louis but raised in Oklahoma, Ted Kimbro began playing professional ball in 1914 with the West Baden Sprudels. After stints with the Louisville White Sox and St. Louis Giants, he moved east to join the Lincoln Giants. His entire baseball career took place before he turned 23; in 104 games against black opposition he hit .283, playing mostly third base and second base.

He was inducted into the U.S. Army on July 18, 1918, and sent to Camp Dix, New Jersey, but continued to play ball on weekends. His last appearance was for the Lincoln Giants on September 1 in a doubleheader against the Royal Giants. Less than a month later he was dead.

According to military records the cause of Kimbro’s death was bronchopneumonia, probably a result of influenza, occurring as it did at the height of the pandemic. The massive U.S. war effort greatly facilitated the spread of the virus, and Camp Dix was hit hard in September and October. Nearly 8000 soldiers came down with the disease, and 774 died. The whole huge training camp was quarantined on September 23, just a week before Kimbro passed away.

(Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 20, 1918, p. 18)

Like Kimbro, Pearl Franklyn“Specks” Webster was born in Missouri, the far northeastern corner to be exact. Also like Kimbro he started out with midwestern teams, but within a couple of years had moved to the east coast. The Royal Giants are the team he’s most identified with, but he played for at least eleven professional teams in the U.S., plus two more in Cuba.

Webster was a a catcher who ran really, really well, much like the better-known Bruce Petway. Although Petway, whose defense was legendary, was probably a much better defender than Webster (who spent a lot of time in the outfield and at first base), Webster was in turn a much better hitter, batting .301 against black opposition, versus Petway’s .231. Webster also averaged an astonishing 77 stolen bases per 154 games (he stole 73 in 146 games with recorded steals), while Petway averaged only 26 per 154 games over his career.

In 1918 Webster and Kimbro were teammates on both the Grand Central Terminal Red Caps and the Hilldale Club, appearing together for the latter team as late as August 8. They were inducted into the Army on the same day, July 18, and were assigned to the same training unit, the 153rd Depot Brigade.

Unlike Kimbro, Webster survived the Camp Dix outbreak. In fact he seems to have completed training and shipped out to France with the 807th Pioneer Infantry by the end of August, before things really went south at Camp Dix. He died in France (I still don’t know the exact location) on November 16. His cause of death was listed as lobar pneumonia. As in Kimbro’s case, although “influenza” isn’t mentioned in the record I have access to, it seems likely that his pneumonia was a consequence of the flu pandemic, given when and where it occurred.

Kimbro and Webster are two of the three black ballplayers known to have died in military service during World War I. The third, Hilldale’s Norman Triplett, died in France of “measles and pneumonia,” according to military records.

Return of the Lost Island Giants

More than a decade ago I wrote about the Lost Island Giants, a 1917 team based in Ruthven, Iowa, that featured Hurley McNair, Ruby Tyrees, and Bingo Bingham, among others. Recently I ran across a photo of the Giants in the Sioux City Journal (September 13, 1917, p. 10), and thought it was worth posting here. For a number of these players this is the only image I’ve seen of them (although the quality isn’t quite good to use any of these on Seamheads).

Owned and operated by Robert Gilkerson, the Lost Island Giants were a predecessor to Gilkerson’s Union Giants, a team that would be a staple of the Midwestern barnstorming circuit well into the 1930s.

Here’s the article that accompanied the photo:

String Bean Williams

I’ve written about Andrew “String Bean” Williams before. A kind of prototype for Satchel Paige—a tall, skinny, right-handed pitcher who exploited his supposedly advanced age for publicity—Williams was a well-known player who moved constantly from team to team in the 1910s and 1920s. In the latter decade, nearly every mention of him also includes a claim that he is nearing fifty, or over fifty, or at any rate extremely old for a ballplayer.

He first appears in the historical record, as far as I can tell, as a utility man for the West Baden Sprudels in 1909. He’s referred to as “Skinny” (or “Skinney”) Williams. He pitched and played shortstop for the Sprudels, and lived in Cairo, Illinois:

(Indianapolis Freeman, September 25, 1909, p. 7)

 

Nobody named Andrew Williams can be found in the 1910 census in or about Cairo, although it was taken in April, after baseball season had already started, so it’s possible Williams was already gone. A fairly large number of ballplayers can’t be found in the 1910 census (the Leland Giants, for example, were traveling in Texas during that month). At least two black men named Andrew Williams lived in Cairo in the 1900 census, but that is a decade before String Bean can be reliably identified, and neither can be linked to him, although they remain leads for future research.

It’s also possible that “Skinny Williams” is not String Bean, as a Skinny Williams is also mentioned in the Freeman playing for the Kansas City Royal Giants in 1911, when String Bean was with the ABCs. If Skinny is someone else, then String Bean would enter the historical record in 1910 with the French Lick Plutos. At one point he was called the “Alabama Wonder,” further confusing the question of his origins:

(Indianapolis Star, April 12, 1910, p. 35)

 

Over his whole career String Bean was roughly an average blackball pitcher, going 73-71 in games we’ve recovered against top line black teams from 1910 through 1925, with an OPS+ of exactly 100. He reached his peak in roughly 1916-1920, when he won 41 games against 27 losses for the Royal Giants, Indianapolis ABCs, American Giants, Bacharach Giants, and other teams. He could, like many Negro league pitchers, hit some. He threw “big, sharp curves,” according to a writer in 1914 (Indianapolis Ledger, July 4, 1914, p. 4); almost two decades later Jimmy Powers, the New York Daily News columnist who was also a rare early white supporter of integrating baseball, praised String Bean as a “tricky curve ball artist” (April 7, 1933, p. 65).

There are very few sustained passages of writing about him, and it can be difficult to piece together a sentence here, a phrase there, into a coherent picture of what he was like. He could be exuberant; at a key point in a 1914 game, “Mr. Williams, alias ‘String Beans’, the all too untaciturn ge’men from [West Baden] Springs, flushed over his seeming victory, was fairly shouting on the mound…” (Indianapolis Ledger, May 23, 1914, p. 4). He was nicknamed “Legs,” and “Unpossible.”

In the spring of 1916 he accompanied the Chicago American Giants to Havana, where they took up the remaining Cuban League schedule of the San Francisco Park club. Williams split six decisions for a team that went 5-9. On April 17, 1916, one Andrew Williams, aged 43, accompanied by his wife Louisa and their year-old daughter Pearl, arrived at New Orleans from Havana. On the same passenger list page can be found String Bean’s teammates Jesse Barber (spelled “Balbour”) and Frank Wickware.

Williams started 1919 as player-manager of the Dayton Marcos. When an article appeared in the local paper noting how the owner John Matthews had been getting much praise recently for the successes of his club, a reader wrote in to protest that credit ought to be given to “Stringbean Williams, who is the real brains and manager as well as star twirler of the Marco club.” It was Williams, the letter writer asserted, who was the “prime factor” in the rise of the Marcos (Dayton Herald, June 26 and June 29, 1919).

Later in the season Williams was signed away by the American Giants, where he remained effective (5-2 against black teams), although there were signs of trouble. At one point during a game “he stalled Rube [Foster] into thinking he had a sore thumb. Rube knew what the trouble was and let him get away with it”—the implication being that String Bean was pitching while drunk (Chicago Defender, August 30, 1919).

(New York Age, July 10, 1920, p. 7)

In 1925 Ben Taylor called him “a real veteran in point of service, being second only to ‘Cyclone’ Joe Williams. They are two of the oldest pitchers in the Eastern loop” (Baltimore Afro-American, January 31, 1925, p. A7). Upon his release by the Bacharach Giants in April 1925, the Harrisburg Telegraph wrote that “Williams, who is nearly fifty years old, plans to retire from the diamond after a career extending over the past two decades. He is probably the oldest pitcher in colored baseball ranks” (April 11, 1925, p. 13).

In 1927 W. Rollo Wilson passed along (or spun himself) this tall tale about String Bean in the Spanish-American War:

(Pittsburgh Courier, April 30, 1927, p. 18)

 

The only other black ballplayer who is supposed to have served in the Spanish-American War (that I remember anyway) was C. I. Taylor.

When Williams joined Syd Pollock’s Havana Red Sox in 1928, playing alongside Cuban teammates, the Utica Observer-Dispatch (perhaps drawing on Pollock’s PR copy) claimed that he spoke “the Cuban language” (May 18, 1928, p. 34). By that September String Bean was in New York City, where Chappy Gardner wrote this about him:

(Pittsburgh Courier, September 8, 1928, p. 14)

 

Sadly, as far as I know Gardner never followed up on his suggestion that he could write a history of String Bean's career.

I have tended to assume the age thing was a schtick, much like Satchel or Pop Watkins—that Williams was probably younger than the claims made for him, possibly by a lot. Normally when a ballplayer, even a player in the fringe world of the blackball circuit, first arrives on the scene, he’s probably in his twenties, very likely in his mid-twenties or younger. So I have vaguely thought that he was probably born somewhere from 1885 to 1890 or so, give or take. The only problem is that, for someone who is so easily traced over nearly two decades (from 1909 to 1929), drawing commentary from writers such as Sol White, Chappy Gardner, Lloyd Thompson, and Ben Taylor, Williams is very difficult to find in any sort of official document. In fact, with the exception of the 1916 passenger list above (which is perhaps arguable), I had never found him at all, until just the other day.

To set it up: the last sighting I had of Williams alive was a Sol White column in 1929:

“String Beans Williams, noted pitcher and baseball authority, will have the grounds [Catholic Protectory Oval] in first-class shape, he having been engaged by Jimmie [Keenan] to look after the field—another commendable trait in the sportsmanship of the Lincolns’ owner.” (New York Amsterdam News, 22 May 1929, p. 9.)

Then…nothing. Until a couple of years later, when Ben Taylor, recounting a 1917 game between the ABCs and American Giants, String Bean Williams vs. Dick Redding. “Williams,” he notes, “is now dead” (Baltimore Afro-American, Feb 28, 1931, p. 14). In 1933 the New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Powers also noted Williams’s death.

Looking through New York City deaths from May 1929 through February 1931, I eventually obtained the death certificate for Andrew Williams, black, “Ball Player,” who died at the age of 56 on October 28, 1929, in the Bronx. He was married to Maggie Williams (rather than Louisa, as in the passenger list).

His age here matches the 1916 passenger list. If the death certificate and the 1916 passenger list are correct, he started his career in fast company at the age of 36 or 37, and continued to perform at the top level of black professional baseball until he was 52. (And he would have been old enough to participate in the Spanish-American War.)

Suffering from tuberculosis, Williams died of a collapsed lung (pneumothorax)—a condition that very tall, thin people are particularly at risk for. He was buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst (Queens).