I thought I’d mention a couple of good books I’ve been reading lately, both of which should be of great interest to anybody who reads this blog:
1) Phil Dixon's American Baseball Chronicles, Volume Three: The 1905 Philadelphia Giants painstakingly describes the entire season for this Sol White-piloted club. This complete, game-by-game survey is, as far as I know, unprecedented in the literature, and gives the most thorough account yet produced of a black baseball team during a single season. That it covers such an early and still only sketchily-known team makes the book all the more worthwhile. As with his previous work on the Kansas City Monarchs, Phil has attempted to chronicle every game, including games against semi-pro opponents that formed the bulk of the Giants’ schedule. He has found box scores for 130 of 149 known games (Sol White reported that altogether the team played 158), most of them against white independent professional or semi-pro teams, although the schedule also included top black opponents (notably the Brooklyn Royal Giants) and white minor league teams. (The semi-pro teams were often bolstered by current or former major leaguers.) This book is a treasure house of details, many wholly unexpected, about, for example, Grant “Home Run” Johnson’s pitching (which was quite good), and Bill Monroe’s “hilarious antics” on the field, which were often the feature of newspaper accounts. (Phil also has a website with additional material on the ’05 Giants and other subjects.)
2) Pricier but also good is Baseball’s First Colored World Series by Larry Lester, which details the 1924 classic between the Kansas City Monarchs and the Hilldale Club, and includes a reproduction of an entire program for one of the games played in Philadelphia. Larry also gives us full batting and pitching statistics for each team for the 1924 season, and play-by-play accounts of each World Series game, along with the historical background and sketches of all the players. Particularly interesting is his account of José Méndez working with Dobie Moore to make him a better shortstop: Moore had to undergo a rather grueling regimen of fielding ground balls and throwing to first for two hours every morning, with every wide throw adding fifteen minutes to practice.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for Severo Nieto’s Early U.S. Blackball Teams in Cuba, which promises to bring a wealth of the legendary Cuban historian’s materials, including box scores, to an American audience. Among many other things, I’m hopeful that this will shed light on the 1900 and 1903 Cuban X-Giants’ Cuban tours, for which I have yet to locate box scores.
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