Agate Type

juan padrón sightings

I finally found Juan Padrón on the passenger manifests on Ancestry.com.  He pitched for Almendares in the 1915/16 Cuban League, which ended on March 26, 1916, and for Molina’s Cuban Stars in the United States in the summer of 1916 (the first appearance I have for him is on May 7, against the ABCs).  So at some point between March 26 and May 7 he had to have traveled from Cuba to the United States.

Actually, I wasn’t altogether sure I would find him.  After a certain point (1912 or so), the passenger manifests for ships from Cuba seem to contain mostly (or only) lists of alien passengers; I haven’t been able to find many traces, for example, of Negro League players returning from Cuba after about 1911.  Since some sources maintain that Juan Padrón was born in Key West, it seemed like a good bet he wouldn’t be listed among the non-citizens entering the country.

Most of the 1916 Cuban Stars arrived in Tampa aboard the S.S. Olivette on April 9, 1916:

(Note the inclusion of the players’ matronyms.)  No Padrón among them.  However, I had seen a “Juan Padrón Acosta” arriving in Tampa a few days earlier, on April 5.  This seemed a red herring, as someone by the same name had also arrived in Tampa several months earlier, on January 12—which was squarely in the middle of the Cuban League season.  Surely this meant Padrón Acosta could not be “our” Juan.

Then it occurred to me to check the 1915/16 box scores, which I haven’t yet studied or compiled.  Juan Padrón started against San Francisco on January 9.  He was knocked out in the second inning and replaced by Dolf Luque (Almendares went on to win, 9 to 5).  Going through every box score through the season’s end on March 26, Padrón never appeared again.  Meanwhile, Juan Padrón Acosta embarked on January 11—so it was not impossible that he was in fact the baseball player.  Here are parts of the record for Padrón Acosta’s January trip to Tampa:

His “Race or People” and last permanent residence:

His height, complexion, eye and hair color, and birthplace:

Although the entries are a bit hard to read, the last two columns read: “U.S.” and “K[ey]West.” (Ancestry.com’s digitization concurs with this reading.)

Here’s the April 5 entry for Padrón Acosta, again arriving at Tampa:

His birthplace:

Clearly the same person as the January 12 traveller (same matronym, also born in Key West).  Again, it’s a little faint, but his occupation is listed here as “B. Player”—which, I think, makes the case very strong that this is our guy.  Padrón’s “last permanent residence” is listed on both manifests as Tampa.  Apparently, he left Almendares to return home for some reason in January, then came back to Cuba at some point before April, but did not rejoin Almendares (or, at least, he failed to get in a game before the season ended).  Then he returned to the U.S. a few days earlier than the rest of Molina’s team—which makes perfect sense, considering that Tampa was his permanent home.

Patrick Rock has also found Juan Padrón traveling to New York from Puerto Rico on May 12, 1920, accompanied by Alejandro Pompez and four other players:

Unfortunately, the columns for birthplace are left blank for Padrón:

So, here’s a roundup of the pertinent information from each passenger manifest listing:

January 12, 1916
Name: Juan Padrón Acosta
Age: 23
Nationality: Cuba
Race or People: “Afric.”
Last Permanent Residence: Tampa, U.S.
Birthplace: K. West, U.S.

April 5, 1916
Name: Juan Padrón Acosta
Age: 24
Calling or Occupation: “B. Player”
Nationality: Cuba
Race or People: “Afric.”
Last Permanent Residence: Tampa, U.S.
Birthplace: K. West, U.S.

May 12, 1920
Name: Juan Padrón
Age: 26
Calling or Occupation: Base ball player
Nationality: Cuban
Race or People: “Black Cuban”
Last Permanent Residence: San Juan, P.R.
Birthplace: not given

1923 negro national league

You asked for it, now you’ve got it.  Patrick Rock has generously supplied his statistical compilation of the 1923 Negro National League.  We’ve got batting and pitching statistics; fielding statistics should come in a week or so.

Download nnl_batting_1923.csv

Download nnl_pitching_1923.csv

Please note that this compilation is copyrighted by Patrick.  In particular, he’d like to reserve exclusivity for gaming purposes to Replay Games, which published his 1923 NNL Yearbook for use with the Replay board game.

If you have any questions, send them to me, and I’ll pass them on to Patrick.

cuban national series on the web

Just got this email from David Skinner:

I had one good game to watch today, thanks to Pete Bjarkman’s tip. The mind boggles. With all the Cuban games I've seen, I hadn't ever watched the Serie Nacional final series until now. The live Cubavision telecasts are free on Windows Media, if you have broadband, I guess it’s what they call streaming video. It’s perfect audio, Spanish of course, good video quality with occasional freezes. Industriales, the Yankees of Cuba, won tonight to cut Santiago de Cuba’s lead to 2 games to 1. Estadio Latinamericano looked so good, with 50,000+ screaming crazies, and the play, especially flamboyant fielding, reminded me of my first trip to Cuba and the feeling that this league is the true heir of the  Negro Leagues. If you’re interested, the website is baseballdecuba.com, just click on window in middle marked PLAY. Game 4 is Sunday at 2PM Eastern.
Best,
David

is pete hill’s hall of fame plaque wrong?

Check out Pete Hill’s page at the HOF site, as well as his plaque (in this slide show).  In both places he’s called Joseph Preston Hill.  It is commonly accepted that he was born on October 12, 1880, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the little bio published in the Baltimore Afro-American in 1924 confirms these details (though not the first name “Joseph”).

It could be, however, that all this—his first name, his birthplace, his age—is wrong.

First, the evidence, collected by Patrick Rock (who else?).

1) A passenger manifest from the S.S. Chalmette, departing from Havana March 18, 1916, and arriving in New Orleans March 20:

Name: John P. Hill
Place of birth: Buena Vista, Virginia.
Date of birth: Not listed
Age: 34

2) A draft registration card from September 12, 1918:

Name: John Preston Hill
Place of birth: not listed
Date of birth: October 12, 1882
Age: 36 (doesn’t match birth date)

3) The 1920 census, in Chicago’s Third Ward:

(I had to break it in two here, though I overlapped it so you can see where the lines join; “John P. Hill” is line 12)

Name: John P. Hill
Place of birth: Virginia
Date of birth: not listed
Age: 35

There are also three other passenger manifests on which Hill and some of his teammates appear:

April 16, 1907, S.S. Merida (posted here), Havana to New York: Preston Hill, 23 years old (with wife “Gerdy,” 24)

April 12, 1908, S.S. Merida, Havana to New York: Preston Hill, 25 years old (with wife Gertrude, 25)

April 4, 1911, S.S. Chalmette, Havana to New Orleans: J.P. Hill, 28 years old.

There’s little doubt, when you consider the dates of travel, the other Negro Leaguers he traveled with, his wife’s name (Gertrude), the matching addresses on the draft card and census form, and the fact that he’s listed as a “Ball Player” on the census (which was quite unusual even for Negro Leaguers in the 1920 census), that these records all refer to the same person, and that that person is Pete Hill the Hall of Famer.

So what do we have?  His first name listed as “John” all three times it’s given; Virginia as his birth state both times; and a range of possible birth years, from 1881 to 1884, with 1882 being given or implied three times (but never the officially accepted 1880). His official birthday, October 12, is corroborated on the draft card.

Patrick points out that Buena Vista, the name of a town in Rockbridge County, Virginia, is also the name of a suburb of Pittsburgh, though the census information also gives Virginia as Hill’s home state.  This is the age of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to find work in the burgeoning industrial belt of the Midwest; it would not be unusual to find black people born in the South but raised in a Northern city, particularly a steel city like Pittsburgh.  On the census form, both his parents are listed as born in Virginia, as is his wife’s mother.  It’s even possible that the families knew each other before they moved to the North (his wife’s family going to Illinois).

So is Joseph Preston Hill, born in 1880 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, really John Preston Hill, born in 1882 in Buena Vista, Virginia?  Is his Hall of Fame plaque wrong?  I’d say it’s a very good chance on all three counts, name, birthdate, and birthplace, though Patrick is not so sure about the Virginia possibility.  We’ll see.  Unfortunately, as he told me, a birth record might not even exist:

Birth certificates were not kept in most states before 1910, and not many town or county records exist from the 19th century.  There are exceptions, but no one has so far found Hill (under any name) yet on the 1900 or 1910 censuses, and we've been looking diligently, and it illustrates the fact that many institutions (including County Clerks’ offices and the U.S. Census Bureau) did not take very good care of records involving its citizens of color.  Remember, Pete Hill was probably the son of former slaves.

UPDATE 10/17/2010 For subsequent developments in the rediscovery of Pete Hill, see:

Pete Hill’s Death Certificate (November 24, 2008)

Pete Hill’s Possible Family (November 28, 2008)

Pete Hill’s Family Confirmed (July 30, 2009)

A Solution to the Mystery of Buena Vista (July 30, 2009)

Photos: Pete Hill, Kenneth & Bettye Hill (August 11, 2009)

Redo? (August 13, 2009)

Happy Birthday (October 12, 2010)

Meet the New Plaque (October 13, 2010)

 

cuban ballplayers in the world war I draft

Patrick Rock has also stumbled onto something it would never have occurred to me to look for: World War I draft registration records for Cuban players in the United States.  They were evidently “resident aliens” (if that was the term then), thus subject to conscription.  The records provide heretofore unknown birthdates and other valuable biographical information that otherwise could be quite difficult to obtain.

These are some of the players he’s found, with accompanying birthdates (as best I can make them out):

Bernardo Baró born Feb 27, 1896
Francisco Campos born Jan 27, 1892
Julián Fabelo born March 19, 1890
Alejandro Oms born March 13, 1896
Eustaquio Pedroso born September 20, 1886
Matías Ríos born February 2, 1895

Among other players, Patrick also found Forrest “One Wing” Maddox, born November 30, 1897.

    

      

    

(click to enlarge)

1907 cuban stars on the s.s. merida

Here’s one of the passenger manifests for ships from Cuba to the United States that Patrick Rock has been working with.  This ship, the S.S. Merida, departed just after the close of the 1907 Cuban League season, and carried both African-American players (Foster, Hill, Johnson, Buckner, McClellan, plus the wives of Foster, Hill, and Johnson) returning home and Abel Linares’s Cuban Stars club, on its way to a summer of barnstorming across the U.S.  The ship arrived in New York on April 19, 1907.

(click to enlarge)

Here’s a detail of the Cuban ballplayers:

 

And the African-American players:

This gives us a roster for the 1907 Cuban Stars, to go along with the ones Jerry Kuntz has put together for the 1899-1905 All-Cubans:

Luis Padrón (listed as manager, interestingly)
Pedro Medina
Ezequiel Ramos
Rafael Almeida
Rafael Figarola
Luis Bustamante
Francisco Morán
Bernardo Carrillo
Luis González
Inocencio Pérez
José Magriñat

Neither Patrick nor I can make out the final player’s surname, except that it seems to start with a “V.”  His first name seems to be Luciano; that doesn’t match any Cuban player of the time I’m aware of.  See what you think. (I’ll check the Chicago Tribune for 1907 Cuban Stars’ box scores, to see if that helps, but won’t be able to get to that for a few days.)

They also list ages, heights, and places of birth (though that’s half-obscured).  Rafael Almeida, the future major leaguer, is the tallest, at 5’10”.  Also notice his age, given as 23.  According to his official baseball age, he was supposed to have been 19 at this time.  However, Patrick notes that these ages (like the heights) could be guesses or approximations by somebody else, possibly a club official or even a customs officer.

UPDATE 10:19 p.m. Sorry, I can’t seem to upload the image large enough to be readable. I’ll see what I can do tomorrow. OK, added details of the names (4/20/07).

campos

In both the Negro Leagues Book and Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, we find “Tatica Campos,” a multi-position player for various Cuban Stars teams of the 1910s and 1920s, up to his final U.S. season in 1930.

Checking up on Tatica from the Cuban side of things, however, we find three players named Campos during this time.  Jorge Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball lists: 1) José “Tatica” Campos, a pitcher/infielder/outfielder who played in the Cuban League from 1913/14 through 1920/21; 2) B. Campos, who appeared briefly (only four at bats in seven games) for Almendares in 1914/15, the same team as Tatica; and 3) Roberto Campos, whose hometown is identified in the index as Manzanillo, an infielder/outfielder (but not pitcher) in the 1923/24 and 1926/27 Cuban League seasons, plus the rival “Triangular” league of 1926/27.

Patrick Rock, using passenger lists for ships from Cuba to the United States (just a fantastic resource), has found records of the Cuban Stars teams of the 1900s through 1920s.  Patrick discovered that the Campos who traveled with the Cuban Stars in 1915-1917, and again in 1930, was named Francisco Campos.  He was born in 1892 in Havana.  On the 1923 Cuban Stars, however, it’s Roberto Campos, born about 1902 in Manzanillo.

So it seems clear that Roberto’s tenure with the ’23 Cuban Stars was mistakenly conflated with the career of the 1910s Campos.  But what about Francisco Campos, as opposed to José?  Was the Cuban Stars’ Campos in 1915-17 the same as the well-known Cuban Leaguer, Tatica Campos?  It seems highly likely, considering that the Cuban Stars at the time were mostly drawn from Almendares, Tatica’s club.  But could the Cuban Stars’ player have been the other Campos with Almendares at this time, the little-used outfielder B. Campos?  Either way, the name Francisco, which appears repeatedly in the records, causes problems.

I checked the Cuban League box scores for the 1910s, focusing on 1914/15, the year that two players named Campos appeared with Almendares.  It turns out that there were definitely two men with the name.  One always appeared as “T. Campos” when first initials were given in box scores, and was often called “Tatica” in the game stories and play-by-plays.  The other appeared both as “F. Campos” and as “S. Campos,” and is referred to three or four times (with both initials) as “el mejicano.”  They appeared together in the lineup twice—both times as “T. Campos” and “S. Campos.”  Here’s one of them, played on February 22 (La Lucha, February 23, 1915):

And here are the seventh and eighth innings of the play-by-play account.  S. Campos, “el mejicano,” ends the seventh with a fly to center (he’s batting in the number three position, having taken Hidalgo’s place in center field).  T. Campos, “Tatica,” pops to the pitcher for the second out of the eighth:

“B. Campos,” by the way, never crops up in 1914/15, at least in La Lucha—it could be that a blurry “S.” on microfilm was mistaken by someone for a “B.”

During both 1913/14 and 1915/16, there is clearly only one Campos on the Almendares roster, and he’s always called “T. Campos” and “Tatica Campos.”  In 1917, however (the strange year when the games were played at Oriental Park, the racetrack, and the teams all took new names), Tatica Campos appeared in box scores as both “T. Campos” and “F. Campos.”

The second Campos of 1914/15 still muddies the waters a bit, but two things lead me to think that Tatica Campos of the Cuban League was the same as Francisco Campos of the Cuban Stars: 1) the second Campos of ‘14/15 was called “el mejicano,” which doesn’t have to refer to his national origin, but probably does—while the passenger records establish Francisco as a Cuban native; and 2) the 1917 instances of Tatica being called “F. Campos.”

We do still have the problem of the name “José” from Figueredo, though.  I can say that I have never seen a “J. Campos” in a Cuban box score from this era.  Perhaps his name was “José Francisco,” but he preferred to go by “Francisco.”  Whatever the case, it seems clear that here we’ve managed to shed light in both directions, on Cuban and American baseball history.

the first cuban teams to tour the united states, 1899-1905

Jerry Kuntz has been researching the earliest U.S. tours by Cuban teams, which, he has discovered, started in 1899, several years earlier than historians previously supposed.  He writes:

I spent the weekend trying to verify comments made by Abel Linares in a chapter of the 1908 book El Baseball en Cuba y América about the first U. S. visit of the All-Cubans. My interest is his mention that the organizer of the first trip was Al Lawson (subject of my research hobby). Linares mentions Lawson by name, along with several players, and says that tour ended in disaster, with players stranded in New York City.  That fits Lawson’s style to a T.  Lawson still had contacts here in Middletown [New York]—Jack Dooley and Jack Lawlor—who were teammates and partners of Lawson going back to 1892.  I suspect he used their influence to schedule many of the 1899 games.  E. B. Lamar took over the scheduling in 1902, and had much more success.

UPDATE

I previously had articles from 1899 that stated that Lawson was planning to import a Cuban team, but no other evidence.  With Linares’s chapter and the name All-Cubans, I went looking for game scores in digital newspaper archives…[Jerry has posted the 1899 and 1902-1905 All-Cubans rosters, and a partial list of scores for the 1899 tour—g.a.]…This is very incomplete.  I don't know how many games were played in 1899, but I think from 1902-1905 the All-Cubans were playing over 70 games each summer.

There are a few of us baseball history fans here in Orange County, New York—we’re thrilled to see that the majority of the games of the first “All-Cubans” tour were right here!  And I’m tickled to find the heavy hand of Al Lawson on yet another baseball milestone.

UPDATE 3:49 p.m. Jorge Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball does list the first All-Cubans’ tour, but dates it to 1900 rather than 1899 (perhaps it’s still another tour?).  Clark and Lester’s Negro Leagues Book, González Echevarría’s Pride of Havana, and Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, however, all put the earliest tour of the All-Cubans in 1904.  Riley doesn’t have an entry for the All-Cubans, and dates the beginning of their successors, the Cuban Stars, at 1907.

new orleans, 1881: the first negro league?

Here’s a brief item from the New York Clipper, June 18, 1881:

Could this be the first Negro League?  Even though it’s a four-club amateur city league, it seems like a landmark of sorts.

did casey stengel discover bullet rogan?

Reproduced below, with David Skinner’s permission, are some excerpts from several email conversations I’ve had with him about Casey Stengel, J. L. Wilkinson, Bullet Rogan, and the 25th Infantry Wreckers.  I’ve drawn on David’s research in some of these posts, but thought readers deserved to see everything he had to say.  (The excerpts are from two different emails sent several months apart, and overlap a little in subject matter.)

I respectfully disagree [David writes] that there is ANY evidence that Casey scouted Rogan for Wilkinson.  In his ghosted Casey at the Bat, he remembers him as “Grogan” and recalls playing the army team in Douglas, New Mexico.  He heaps praise on “Grogan” and credits him with later playing for the Monarchs, but makes no claim to have recommended him to Wilkinson.  This isn't to say that Casey didn't talk to Wilkie.  Casey's faulty memory is partly responsible for the misstatements of Robert Creamer in Stengel: His Life and Times, which in turn are the source for the misstatements of later writers like John Holway and Janet Bruce.

It was Creamer who decided that “Grogan” was Rogan and that Douglas, New Mexico, was Douglas, Arizona.  He should have quit while he was ahead.  I believe Creamer was the first to wrongly locate the 25th at Fort Huachuca, since it was the closest army base at the time of his writing and he didn't know of Camp Little, etc.  He may also have invented the story of Stengel tipping Wilkie about the Wreckers players, or at least Rogan.  Casey may have known Bullet, could have seen him or played against him in earlier days in Kansas City.  But he didn't scout him or even see him play in Arizona.  The Nogales Daily Herald, which I went through to research my article on the Wreckers for the Arizona Baseball Journal, tells us that Rogan, although team captain, was unavailable for the Stengel series, and that he neither pitched nor played a position.

David

***

I do know that Stengel never saw Rogan pitch in Arizona, despite his assertion that he did (although he called him Grogan), but he surely knew him from earlier days in Kansas City.  I know little about the 24th Infantry and nothing of the cavalries.  There may have been a company at least of the 24th at Camp Newell in Naco (the border town near here), by the way, the only place in the mainland U.S. to have been bombed by a foreign power (by mistake by an American mercenary flying for Mexican revolutionaries in 1919).  The Bisbee Museum has a ripped photo of a baseball team from a company of the 24th, no other ID.  I know nothing, although I would very much like to know, about baseball or players (except a story in the Douglas Daily Dispatch of a 10th Cavalry game vs.  the white 1st Cavalry team from Camp Harry J. Jones in Douglas, the third of the World War I / Mexican Revolution-era border posts) at Ft. Huachuca (where I used to teach and my son played soccer), but I do know from the post historian that the 25th was not there until after the period in question.

What I mostly know about is the 25th at Camp Stephen D. Little in Nogales in 1919, which I researched for an article in the one-shot Arizona Baseball Journal a decade or so ago.  They in fact did not play a lot of outside baseball, although each company had a team and they played each other, the details of which games were not reported.  I went through the Nogales daily for the whole year, after finding nothing in Tucson or Phoenix papers (also nil in Bisbee and Douglas dailies), and there apparently was off-post track and football (Dobie Moore starred in both) but little reported baseball.  The Wreckers were bragged by the Daily Herald as the best team in the Army, but their games were little reported, maybe a mention of winning a home game vs.  a local team from Arizona or Sonora, but no game stories. 

Until the visit of Stengel’s “K.C. All-Stars.”  The games at the Morley Avenue  grounds (site of the present WPA-built job where the Arizona-Mexico League and other ‘30s and ‘50s teams played in OB as well as the 2003 indie league club I operated, which led the league when it folded) were heavily front page promoted, initially filled with misinformation about “Stengler,” a “pitcher for the White Sox,” but later with much info about the KC players, five (including Casey, who was between engagements at the time) with major league experience, the best remembered being the catcher, future batting champ Bubbles Hargrave.  The rest of the so-called major leaguers had only had cups of coffee, two with the 1914 Buffeds, but the five noted all checked out, after allowing for misspellings.  There was a top AAA pitcher on the team as well.

The games themselves were barely covered except to note a fast game in front of a big crowd, one runs-and-hits-only line score.  Moore hit a big home run to win one game, one result (the final game) was never reported, and nothing more about baseball after the morning of game 3.  Captain Rogan, as he was called (his baseball rather than army title; all commissioned officers were of course white), did not play.  Little else to be gleaned from the Herald, just a lineup for one game with a few last names of future Negro Leaguers: Ward, 3B, White, RF, Johnson (which one?) C, Fagen (sic) 2B, Herring 1B, Moore, SS, making them the only Negro Leaguers I could confirm playing vs. “K.C.”  It was previously reported that “Captain Rogan and his aggregation of hitters,” would not be there, with the two future Negro Leaguers among them being Goliath and Hawkins.  Other Negro League names of Wrecker players mentioned during the season include OF McNair and P Cooper.  Of course most of the above names are linked to the Monarchs, but you know of Herring (and a Johnson!) with the 1920 St. Louis Giants; Goliath, Ward, and White were with the 1920 Chicago Giants.  It seems more than the Monarchs benefited from the 25th, but Wilkie certainly got the cream.

David

David also pointed out that the 25th Infantry was not, in 1919-1920, stationed at Ft.  Huachuca:

The 25th moved from Hawaii to Camp Stephen D. Little, and would not move to Ft.  Huachuca for some time.  To quote my article in the Arizona Baseball Journal:

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that Ft. Huachuca was long the home of black regiments, and that the 25th actually was stationed there from 1932 to 1942, and elements of it were there from 1928 to 1931.  In 1919, however, the 10th Cavalry, at Huachuca from 1913 to 1931, was the only black regiment on post.

I footnote that from Cornelius Smith’s post history, but the dates were confirmed for me by the post historian, directly from army records.

David

I also wanted to add to David’s commentary the fact that by 1920 J. L. Wilkinson had already known Wilber Rogan for several years.  According to Phil Dixon, Rogan pitched briefly for Wilkinson’s All-Nations club during a furlough from the Army in 1917, including one game (a loss) against the St. Louis Giants (see his book The Monarchs 1920-1938, pages 24-25).