Agate Type

York Colored Monarchs

 

In 1889 the Cuban Giants and the Colored Gorhams, the two most famous professional black baseball teams in the United States, joined the otherwise all-white Middle States League. The Cuban Giants competed for the pennant, which they barely lost to Harrisburg after some very questionable decisions by the league at season’s end. The following year a white promoter named James Monroe Kreiter signed most of the Cuban Giants away for a new team representing York. Kreiter’s club was called the Colored Monarchs, and it played in the Eastern Interstate League, a new circuit that replaced the Middle States League.

The team that had won the Middle States pennant in 1889, the Harrisburg Ponies, signed two of the Cuban Giants for 1890, Frank Grant and Clarence Williams. The Monarchs, however, still had future Hall of Famer Sol White as well as George Williams, Arthur Thomas, and William Selden. Each of these four finished in the top eight in batting average, Williams and Thomas finished 1-2 in slugging percentage, and the team proceeded to run away with the pennant. The Ponies were their only viable challenger. In July, however, Harrisburg jumped the league to join the Atlantic Association. The remainder of the Interstate League, with the York Monarchs way in front, voted to disband—a move, many have suspected, that was intended to prevent a black team from winning the championship.

There is but one well-known image of the York Colored Monarchs (above): drawings of ten players plus Kreiter, which ran in newspapers at the time, and has been reproduced in various places in recent decades.

Well, as it turns out, these drawings were based on a team photograph of the Monarchs. Kevin Pope has sent me images of the photograph, which currently resides in a private collection (not Kevin’s). This is one of the most amazing images I’ve seen in a long time. It may be that it is already known to some of you out there, but when I first saw it I was dumbfounded.

(Kevin photographed the image under less-than-ideal circumstances, resulting in a reflection obscuring the face of William Selden. But he provided another image that shows Selden—see below.)

Standing, L to R: Abe Harrison, William Malone, George Williams, Sol White, Arthur Thomas
Seated, middle: J. Monroe Kreiter
Seated, front row, L to R: William Whyte, Ben Boyd, Jack Frye, William Jackson, William Selden

 

Here are details of the various players, including Selden:

 

 ABE HARRISON

Abe Harrison (1867-1932) played for the Philadelphia Orions and the Argyle Hotel team before joining the Cuban Giants, for whom he played into the late 1890s. A talented infielder and on-field comedian, he was known as the “minstrel man short stop” (Trenton Evening Times, October 13, 1897, p. 8). He batted .255 with 25 stolen bases for York in 1890. I believe this is the first photograph of Harrison I’ve ever seen.

 

WILLIAM MALONE

William H. Malone (1868-1917) first played professionally for the Philadelphia Pythians of the National Colored League in 1887 before joining the Cuban Giants in 1888 and 1889, the York Monarchs in 1890, the Big Gorhams in 1891, and the Page Fence Giants in 1895. For the Monarchs he went 13-5 with a 2.74 ERA.

 

GEORGE WILLIAMS

George L. Williams (1864-1918) played for the Washington Manhattans and Philadelphia Orions before joining the Cuban Giants in 1885. The following year he became their captain. Before the 1887 season he was approached by both the Minneapolis Millers of the Northwestern League and the Oswego Starchboxes of the International League, but turned them down to remain with the Cuban Giants through the 1889 season (“Base Ball Gossip,” Trenton Evening Times, February 1, 1887, 1). Like many of his teammates he moved to the York Monarchs in 1890, where he captained the team, won the batting title with a .386 average, and led the league with a .582 slugging percentage. He spent 1891 with the Big Gorhams, then in 1892 joined the Philadelphia police department. He left briefly in 1905 and 1906 to organize the Wilmington Giants, but quickly returned to the force, becoming its first black detective in 1909. He was “noted for his daring,” and also for his generosity: every Christmas he organized food and gift drives for poor black families. In 1918 he was shot and killed in the line of duty (“Detective Slain Battling Thugs—George L. Williams, Former Cuban Giants Baseball Player, Is Shot,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10, 1918, 6).

 

SOL WHITE

Sol White probably needs no introduction to readers of this blog. His career as a professional ballplayer, manager, and coach, in black leagues, white minor leagues, for black independent teams, and in Cuba, has been very well-chronicled. He was the co-founder and manager of two of the most famous teams in black baseball history, the Philadelphia Giants and the New York Lincoln Giants, and wrote the first (and for many years only) book about African American professional baseball. For York in 1890 he hit .350 (third in the league), slugged .457, stole 21 bases, and finished second in the league with 74 runs scored. In 2006 he was very deservedly elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

 

ARTHUR THOMAS

Arthur Thomas (1864-1895) first caught for the Manhattan Base Ball Club of Washington, D. C., at the age of 15 in 1880. He joined the West End club of Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1881 and 1882, and in 1883 rejoined the Manhattans under S. K. Govern before moving with Govern to the Cuban Giants in 1885. He was described as “a good general player, a good batsman, fair base runner, and excellent throw to the bases” (“Good Game Promised,” Trenton Evening Times, May 9, 1886, p. 8). Sol White later said of Thomas:

He was 6 feet 4 inches in height; his arms almost reached his knees; he was sorta [sic] sway-backed and gangled-legged [sic]; he had a moaning voice and actually would cry when his team lost a game. His facial expressions were paradoxical; when he laughed you would have to look twice to see whether he was crying. An extremely hard worker, he ruled the roost including the captain. Thomas was a great receiver behind the bat. With his long arms he would reach out and grab wild pitches and when the ball left his hand for second base it looked like a long snake. (“Sol White Recalls,” New York Age, December 27, 1930, 6)

With the York Monarchs in 1890, Thomas hit .333 and led the league with 26 doubles and 11 triples, and finished second to his teammate George Williams in slugging percentage with .567. After leaving big-time baseball Thomas settled in Trenton, New Jersey, where he caught for and captained both black and white semipro teams. He died in Trenton of consumption (tuberculosis) at the age of 30 on August 8, 1895 (“Died,” Trenton Evening Times, August 11, 1895, 5; “Observations from the Grandstand,” Trenton Evening Times, August 9, 1896, 3).

 

J. MONROE KREITER

A member of a prominent Harrisburg family, James Monroe Kreiter, Jr. (1856-1911) was a ballplayer in his youth. He later managed Harrisburg’s Eastern League entry before founding the York Monarchs in 1890. His real job was as a printer for the Harrisburg Patriot newspaper, and he became active in the typographical union as well as local politics. He eventually secured a position as the U.S. government’s chief printer in Panama.

 

WILLIAM WHYTE

William T. Whyte (1860-1936) served as pitcher and outfielder for the St. Louis Black Stockings and Boston Resolutes before joining the Cuban Giants in 1885. He stayed with them through 1893, except for his year with the York Monarchs, where he went 11-5 with a 3.02 ERA, batted .302, and slugged .453. He retired to Trenton, New Jersey.

 

BEN BOYD

Benjamin F. Boyd (1858-?) was a veteran of the original Cuban Giants. He was born in Maryland in 1858, and started his baseball career in Washington, D. C., in 1874. “A good general player” and versatile infielder, he joined S. K. Govern’s Manhattan Base Ball Club in 1883, and played for the Cuban Giants (1885-1889), the York Monarchs (1890), and Big Gorhams (1891). He batted just .267 for the Monarchs, with a lone double as his only extra base hit.

 

JACK FRYE

John H. Frye (1864-1904) was the fifth known African American to play in organized baseball in the United States, appearing briefly for the Reading Actives of the Interstate Association late in the 1883 season. He came to the Actives from the Renovo, Pennsylvania, club, where he had caught for Patrick Friel, the team’s star pitcher. Friel moved to the Reading club, and a few weeks later Frye was brought in to catch for him (“McCafferty Struck,” Reading Eagle, September 15, 1883, 1). Of the 20 other players on the Reading roster that year, 17 would eventually play in the major leagues, including Friel, who would make it as a veteran outfielder in 1890 and 1891. Frye also played for another white team, Lewiston of the 1886 Pennsylvania State Association, before joining the Cuban Giants, where he would spend most of his career. With York in 1890 he batted .303 with a .438 slugging percentage. He retired from baseball after the 1896 season and moved to Culpeper County, Virginia, where he died on June 10, 1904 (“Bits for the Fans,” Harrisburg Telegraph, June 11, 1904, 8).

 

WILL JACKSON

A left-handed catcher, Will Jackson was in his first season as a professional. In 46 games he batted .251 and stole 18 bases. In 1894, Jackson and George Stovey formed a “left-handed battery” for the Cuban Giants. By the late 1890s, when Jackson had graduated to captaining the Giants, he was more of an outfielder. So far, given the commonness of his name, I haven’t been able to track down any specific information about him.
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WILLIAM SELDEN

Pitching for the Boston Resolutes of the National Colored League in 1887, William H. “Billy” Selden (1866-1926) won their only league game in Louisville, whereupon the team immediately went broke. Stranded, the players had to make their own way back to Boston. Selden, however, was signed by the Cuban Giants, and went on to a long career as a pitcher for black professional teams, including the Cuban Giants, Gorhams, and Cuban X-Giants. By the late 1890s he was spending the offseasons as a vaudeville performer. For York in 1890 he went 15-6, 2.63, with a league-second 100 strikeouts, and batted .330 with a .429 slugging percentage and 19 steals. Box score research shows him (so far) undefeated (11-0) against black professional teams in the 19th century. This is the first photograph I’ve seen of Selden.

 

 

 

“Let Me See That Ball!”

From Daniel Okrent’s 1989 book Baseball Anecdotes, p. 72:

You might be expecting a Bill James or Rob Neyer-style debunking in which I demonstrate that no such thing ever happened, or that the circumstances were totally different, or whatever. Actually, Okrent’s rendering of the incident seems completely accurate. Here’s the Brooklyn Daily Eagle account of it:

(Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 8, 1915, p. 33)

So I’m not debunking this story, but I can point to a precursor. On August 22, 1907, under very similar circumstances, Rube Foster pulled the same thing on Indianapolis ABCs’ pitcher Leonard Griffin:

 

(Indianapolis Star, August 23, 1907, p. 9)

 

(Indianapolis Freeman, August 31, 1907, p.  7)

A week later, the Freeman printed a cartoon commemorating the incident:

(Indianapolis Freeman, September 6, 1907, p. 7)

Huggins’s 1915 deployment of the “let me see that ball” trick made its way into mainstream baseball lore, possibly due to its inclusion in the 1929 book Babe Ruth’s Own Story. Meanwhile, Foster’s 1907 conning of Griffin was remembered in black baseball history (though the details were sometimes left out), to be occasionally revived by later historians (such as Paul Debono in his 1997 book on the Indianapolis ABCs).

But there are many other examples of this trick stretching back into the nineteenth century. This example, pulled off in 1896 by former major league catcher Sam Laroque while playing for Dubuque in the Western Association, is noteworthy because Laroque’s phrasing is almost identical to that of Foster:

(Rockford, Illinois, Daily Register-Gazette, July 22, 1896, p. 3)

A couple of years earlier, while complaining about John “Egyptian” Healy falling prey to Mike Lehane’s request to see the ball in an Eastern League game, a Sporting Life correspondent called it an “old ‘gag’ which the writer has seen worked when he wore Knickerbockers”:

(Sporting Life, June 30, 1894, p. 6)

I haven’t attempted any kind of full archeology of this particular trick, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Doc Adams had pulled it on somebody in the 1840s.

sol white’s official base ball guide

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a new edition of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, with an introduction and notes by yours truly. This pamphlet, packed with photos and tiny print, was originally published in 1907 and sold at Philadelphia Giants games. It was the first book devoted solely to black professional baseball, and remained the only one for more than 60 years. To this day it’s one of only a handful of books on nineteenth-century black baseball.

My introduction goes over Sol White’s life and career, adding some to what’s been published about him. I’ve also written some brief notes on the players, managers, and owners who are pictured in the book’s photos, and identified the players in several of the team photos.

The publisher is Summer Game Books. It's currently available through them directly, as well as Amazon.com and Smashwords, and should be on several other platforms eventually. You will also be able to order a print copy by April 25.

cristadoro & escudero, rose hill 1868

In 2010 Brian McKenna posed this question in the comments on a post about Esteban Bellán, the first Cuban major leaguer and a co-founder of the Habana Base Ball Club.  Before becoming a professional, Bellán played for Rose Hill, the baseball club associated with St. John’s College, now Fordham University:

Has anyone ever checked on a college teammate of Stephen Bellan’s named Christadoro (perhaps actually Cristadoro or Cristodoro)?  He was signed/enlisted at the same time Bellan was by the Unions of Morrisania in June 1868.  Don’t know if he played with the club though.

Brian also included a reference to this item from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (June 29, 1868, p.2), listing recent transfers of players from club to club:

A couple of weeks ago John Thorn wrote to clear up the question of Cristadoro’s identity:

A Joseph Cristadoro (also spelled Christadoro), wigmaker, is listed in the NYC Directory of 1839-40; he advertises a hair dye in farflung papers of the late 1860s, though he is based on Maiden Lane in NYC.  A 12-year-old of that name is a student at the “Roman Catholic College” in West Farms (St. John’s, Rose Hill) in 1850.  He was born in New York and may be of Italian descent rather than Spanish.

And a bit later, John was able to confirm his hunch about Cristadoro through the passport application of Cristadoro’s father, born in Palermo in 1813:



John also pointed out that another Rose Hill player from 1868, one “Esendoro,” was more likely to be of Latin American origin:

 

John then steered me to César González Gómez, who figured out several years ago that “Esendero” was really Manuel Escudero, a St. John’s student from Tepic, a city in the state of Nayarit on Mexico’s Pacific coast.  He joins a number of other Mexican students in the U.S. who have been documented playing baseball in the 1860s.  Although César doesn’t yet know for sure, given that Escudero was a teammate of Esteban Bellán, who played a major role in establishing baseball in Cuba, it seems very possible that Escudero played a similar role in bringing baseball to Mexico.

lockout league

Mark Anthony Neal suggests that NBA players might respond to the lockout by forming their own league.  He also points to the Negro leagues as a possible inspiration, given that 80 percent of NBA players have African heritage.  The Negro National League, he writes,

did much more than entertain; it was a logical extension of the Black owned world that Blacks were forced to navigate in the era of State sponsored racial segregation.  Ironically, as William C. Rhoden notes in his book Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete, the Negro National League “marked one of the last times that African Americans controlled their own major-league sports organization.” (102)

A basketball Players League would, obviously, be quite different from the historical Negro leagues, for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain.  The parallel between the Negro leagues and the proposed league does work to the extent that an ex-NBA league, assuming it really was largely self-financed by players, would certainly involve a lot more input and control by black athletes than any other major sports league since the Negro leagues.  However—the Negro leagues were not really self-financed.  Yes, a few players or former players—most notably Rube Foster—eventually became owners, and Foster of course founded the Negro National League.  But most of the ownership ranks were filled out with non-players, many of whom were white.  The Negro leagues were not players’ leagues in any sense.   

A better baseball parallel might be the actual Players League of 1890.  There were no black players involved, but it was the literal equivalent of what Professor Neal is suggesting.  At that time the players collectively commanded much less capital on their own, and so had to seek outside financial backing.  This proved the league’s weak point (as I understand it anyway). A. G. Spalding was able to exploit the investors’ lack of commitment and solidarity, and the Players League never played a second season.

Would it happen this way again?  Clearly NBA players have greater collective financial resources, although I have no idea whether they have enough clout to finance a league completely by themselves.  One suspects some form of outside investment would have to be secured.  I really don’t know how practical or likely the whole scheme is—probably not very, but who knows?

parallel games, parallel lives

The first, very familiar photo shows Bud Fowler (standing in the middle) with the Keokuk team of the Western League in 1885.  Fowler, of course, was the first known African American professional baseball player.  The second photo, probably not so familiar to most baseball fans, shows Andrew Watson, the first player of mixed race heritage (Scottish/Afro-Caribbean) to play at the highest level of British football.

Fowler, literally isolated, with none of his teammates close by (an effect heightened by the retouching on some of the other players), looks stiff and awkward and uncomfortable.  Watson, by contrast, blends in easily with his team.  While it would also be easy to read too much into just two photos, clearly in this case their composition fortuitously reflects the real circumstances of their careers, at least at the moments they were taken.

The two men were virtual contemporaries, though from very different backgrounds.  Fowler was born John W. Jackson, the son of an African American barber in Fort Plain, New York, on March 16, 1858.  Watson was born in British Guiana on May 18, 1857.  His father was a wealthy (white) Scottish planter, who saw to it that Watson was university-educated.

Fowler had become a professional ballplayer, and had adopted his nom de guerre, at least by 1878.  He played in organized baseball, mostly as an infielder, before the color line was solidly drawn, off and on from 1878 to 1892.  He bounced from team to team, never having a serious chance to make the major leagues, but playing at the highest level of the minors.  Late in his career he helped to found the Page Fence Giants, one of the earliest black teams of the Jim Crow era and a precursor of the great Negro league teams.

Fowler was a professional; Watson was an (officially) amateur player at a time when the amateur game was still dominant.  He played as a full back for various Scottish clubs beginning in the mid 1870s before joining Queen’s Park, the premier club in Scotland and one of the very best in Britain at the time.  He played three times for the Scottish national team.  Eventually Watson became the first non-English player invited to play for Corinthians, the most prestigious and probably best side in England in the 1880s. 

Although Fowler remained active in baseball as a player, manager, and organizer well into his forties, he eventually fell into poverty, and died in 1913 in upstate New York, not far from where he was born, at the early age of 54.  Andrew Watson’s post-football circumstances are not well understood, though it is known that he emigrated to Australia and died there in 1902, at age 44.

edward powell, base ball pitcher

As a chaser to the last post (about black ballplayers in 1900), here is the only African American I have been able to find in the 1880 census who listed baseball as his occupation: 17-year-old Edward Powell of Fulton, New York.  I know absolutely nothing about him otherwise, and have never heard of him outside of his census record.

black ballplayers in 1900

Check out these charts prepared by the sociology students of W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University for the “American Negro” exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition:

I’m not sure under what category professional ballplayer would be listed (not the “professions,” which I think would mean mostly medicine, law, education, and the pulpit).  Most likely there weren’t any black professional ballplayers in Georgia at the turn of the century.  There weren’t that many in the county at large, at best a few dozen, probably—though there would have been many, many semi-professional or amateur players, of course.

In the 1900 U.S. Census, I’ve located a total of nine.  I wouldn’t claim that this is anything like a comprehensive accounting, since my research mostly focuses on later eras, and it’s not actually that easy to search my notes for exactly this information.  But here are the black men I’ve found in the 1900 census whose occupation is listed as ballplayer:

Sherman Barton (listed as a “Base Ballist,” a phrase that would have sounded antique even in 1900)
John Bingey (sic; could be the same as William Binga)
Harry Buckner
Peter Burns, a key figure in the Tokohama affair
Charles Grant, “Tokohama” himself
William Holland
Grant Johnson
John Patterson
Solomon White

For whatever reason, all lived in Chicago as of June, 1900, when the census was enumerated, except for Barton, who lived in Normal, Illinois, and Johnson, who appeared in his hometown, Findlay, Ohio.  All played for the Columbia Giants or Chicago Unions around this time.

Occupations of Charles Grant and Solomon White as listed in the 1900 U.S. Census.

Walter Ball can be found living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he was playing professional ball, but in the census he is listed as a “R. R. Porter.”  A couple of guys who might be Bill Monroe can be found in Chicago, but aren’t listed as ballplayers.  The 17-year-old Pete Hill, who by some accounts started playing professionally in 1899, is listed as a “day laborer” in Pittsburgh.  Many others who were definitely professionals at the time, especially in the East, can’t be found for certain in the census, including nearly the whole roster of the Cuban X Giants (Frank Grant, Clarence Williams, etc.).  It seems likely that the Cubans were on the road and were missed by the census takers.

Going beyond the census, I’ve found one official document that lists a black man’s occupation as ballplayer in 1900: the death certificate of Andrew Jackson, who had been for several years the third baseman and captain of the Cuban X Giants.  Jackson, who had led his team on a Cuban tour a few months earlier, died of heart failure at the age of 34 in New York City on May 15, 1900.  (Apologies for the poor quality of the image.)

In the sideways portion of the form at the bottom we are given Jackson’s profession:

I have to say I know virtually nothing about Andrew Jackson, or for that matter about the Cuban X Giants, which seem to be one of the least written about great teams in African-American baseball history.

ed wilson & the acme colored giants, 1898

The latest issue of Black Ball reprints a short article from the April 2, 1898, issue of Sporting Life.  Here it is, courtesy of the LA84 Foundation, which has digitized much of the magazine:

The Acme Colored Giants, representing Celeron (near Jamestown, New York), was the last all-black team of the 19th century to play in an organized, otherwise white league, the Iron and Oil League.  They weren’t especially successful, finishing last at 8-41, but several of their players are recognizable, notably Tokohama conspirator Dave Wyatt, who would later become an important sportswriter for a number of black newspapers, and Ed Wilson.  Wilson just may be the Ed Wilson who later played for the Cuban X Giants and smashed three home runs in one game off future major leaguer Stoney McGlynn in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1902. 

I didn’t know much about Wilson before, but the Sporting Life piece identifies his hometown as Bellevue, Pennsylvania, a small borough adjacent to Pittsburgh in Allegheny County.  Over the years spanning the turn of the century, I was able to find one African-American man named Edward Mathew Wilson of an appropriate age living in Bellevue.  There’s no smoking gun linking this Ed Wilson to baseball.  He’s listed as a day laborer in the 1900 census, a “general” worker in the 1910 census (his younger brother Charles was a piano player), and as an employee of a steel car company on his World War I card.  Still, the Bellevue connection seems like an important clue.  The 1900 census lists his birthdate as June 1873, in Pennsylvania; the 1910 census says he was 36, and his World War I card, assuming that it belongs to the same person, has him born on January 3, 1875.

The 1900 and 1910 census entries are clearly for the same person, although so far it seems to me that the same can’t be said for certain of the World War I card.  But the Sporting Life article does give us a good lead.

the lawson brothers

  

If you have a chance, pick up Jerry Kuntz’s seriously fascinating new book about the Lawson brothers—Alfred Lawson, who was (briefly) a major league pitcher, a baseball promoter who organized outlaw minor leagues and barnstorming tours of Cuba, an important figure in early aviation, and founder of his own religion, called “Lawsonomy”; and his younger brother George, a.k.a. “Andy,” a con man, vaudeville manager, and anti-Klan activist who tried to organize the racially-integrated Continental League in 1921.

Alfred, incidentally, founded the 1907 outlaw Atlantic League, whose Brooklyn club featured Luis Padrón, Emilio Palomino, Andrés Ortega, and Tinti Molina.