lost generation

Joe Cephus Taylor was a 1950s center fielder who had some pretty good years in the high minors.  He didn’t get much of a chance at the majors until he was 28, though, and he never established himself there.  

Rob Neyer investigates an anecdote about Taylor (how he supposedly pinch-hit while drunk in the PCL in 1959) in his fascinating Big Book of Baseball Legends.  In the course of his investigation Neyer becomes more interested in the fact that this excellent prospect, “definitely a major league hitter” according to Lefty O’Doul, only joined organized baseball in 1951 at the advanced age of 25. 

Neyer checks Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, which pushes the start of Taylor’s professional career back to 1949 as a catcher with the Chicago American Giants. But 23 is still a very late start.  So he turns to Larry Moffi and Jonathan Kronstadt’s book Crossing the Line: Black Major Leaguers, 1947-1959, and quotes this bit from them:

“Joe Taylor’s baseball career was launched by a sportswriter.  Writing for the Pittsburgh Courier, Earl Johnson covered Taylor’s exploits as a sandlot catcher in the Pittsburgh area.  Johnson’s articles and personal encouragement helped Taylor gain the confidence to pursue a career in baseball.” (p. 122)

But Neyer doesn’t find this very satisfactory, and concludes that “we wind up with more questions than when we started.”

Now, I’m not an expert on the 1940s, and certainly not on Joe Taylor.  From looking at the article about him at the BR Bullpen, it’s apparent there are a number of people who know a lot more about him than I do.  But it doesn’t take research to note Taylor’s birth date (March 2, 1926).  This would mean he turned eighteen in 1944.  And what was going on then?  A check of the World War II Army Enlistment Records reveals one Joe C. Taylor, “Negro,” born in 1926 in Alabama, joining the Army on July 27, 1944, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This is not a momentary blind spot.  Neyer and Eddie Epstein, in their enjoyable book Baseball Dynasties, write, “At another point in this book, we suggest that perhaps wartime teams really can’t be taken too seriously because the talent base was so depleted.  However, this wasn’t so true in the Negro Leagues, as most of the top black players played right on through the early ‘40s” (p. 227).  A couple of sentences later they cite the aging trio of Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard, none of whom served in the military during the war, their ages ranging from 30 to 39 at the start of the draft in 1942.

Readers of this blog probably know that this is patently not the case.  Plenty of Negro League ballplayers missed time to the war, and it certainly affected the quality of the teams and leagues.  Moreover the war must have hindered the careers of black players just as much as it did white players.  There’s not only Cecil Travis, there’s also Monte Irvin.   And it goes beyond those who were already established Negro Leaguers.  Note that the list of players in military service I linked to above doesn’t include Luke Easter (who served in 1942-43, then worked in war-related industries) or, for that matter, Joe Taylor, presumably because neither actually played in the Negro Leagues until after the war.

Taylor was apparently discharged sometime in 1946 (I don’t have the exact date). His military service must have delayed the start of his baseball career by about two years.  Which, at that age, is a pretty big deal.  There are other unusual factors in Taylor’s case, not least the fact that he seems to have played softball rather than baseball when he first returned from the army.  But the point I want to make is not about Joe Taylor and what a great player he was, or wasn’t, or could have been.  It’s what he represents, which is the huge dent the war made in a whole generation of black ballplayers—the generation that just happened to be the one that within a few years would be integrating organized baseball. 

We don’t often think about the fact that the first group of African American ballplayers in the majors had already had to pass through the generational crucible of war.  Certainly, on an individual level this might have toughened them (insofar as experiences of racism and segregation hadn’t already).  But one of the things we don’t know (and probably can’t know) is how many careers got derailed, how many promising black ballplayers lost their skills or abilities or lives on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific.

To illustrate, here is a list of black American Hall of Famers arranged by year of birth up through the 1930s, excluding those who were not elected as players (I’m not sure about Rube Foster, but I included him anyway), and including players from Puerto Rico.

1865    Frank Grant
1879    Rube Foster
1882    Pete Hill
1884    John Henry Lloyd
1886    Cyclone Joe Williams
1888    Ben Taylor
1890    Louis Santop
1893    Bullet Rogan
1894    Jud Wilson
1896    Oscar Charleston
1897    Biz Mackey
1898    Andy Cooper
1899    Judy Johnson
1900    Mule Suttles
1901    Turkey Stearnes
1903    Cool Papa Bell
1904    Bill Foster
1905    Willie Wells
1906    Satchel Paige
1907    Buck Leonard
1907    Hilton Smith
1908    Ray Brown
1911    Josh Gibson
1913    Ray Dandridge
1915    Willard Brown
1916    Leon Day
1919    Monte Irvin
1919    Jackie Robinson
1921    Roy Campanella
1923    Larry Doby
1931    Ernie Banks
1931    Willie Mays
1934    Hank Aaron
1934    Roberto Clemente
1935    Bob Gibson
1935    Frank Robinson
1937    Orlando Cepeda
1938    Willie McCovey
1939    Lou Brock

I might easily have missed somebody, but it probably wouldn’t make much difference.  Here is the count by decade of birth:

1860s: 1
1870s: 1
1880s: 4
1890s: 7
1900s: 9
1910s: 6
1920s: 2
1930s: 9

The 1920s produced only two black Hall of Fame players.  If you counted Sol White, the twenties would be matched by the 1860s.  And there’s the eight-year gap between Larry Doby and Ernie Banks.  Some sources say Doby was born in 1924, which would make it a seven-year gap (although there is apparently also some evidence that he was born earlier than 1923).  In any case, you have to go back to the gap between Frank Grant and Rube Foster to match or exceed it.  Joe Taylor, of course, was born in 1926, right in the midst of this demographic wasteland.

Comments

[John]

The most probable reason Joe Taylor didn't have a better major league career was that he was apparently a very heavy drinker who loved to party and chase women (not that there is anything wrong with that). There is a pretty funny (and somewhat racist) anecdote about this in "Branch Rickey's Little Blue Book" if I remember correctly. He did die young too though whether it's related to his lifestyle is unknown.