Here (finally) is the sequel to my post on the early St. Louis Giants’ ballparks. The third (and concluding) part should be up tomorrow.
From 1911 through 1915, the St. Louis Giants apparently played at several of the ballparks mentioned in the last post: Handlan’s Park; Kavanaugh’s Athletic Park; and Kuebler’s Park, which was sometimes also known as Giants Park. As late as 1915, Conrad Kuebler was again apparently the team’s main financial backer, though it’s unclear how consistent this relationship was during the early 1910s.
None of the aforementioned locations proved to be permanent, and in 1916 the Giants’ ballpark situation deteriorated dramatically. Their earliest games that season were played at the Christian Brothers College diamond. Later, when local semipro baseball promoter Eddie Brock stepped in as the team’s financial backer, they began playing ball at Brock’s Park at 3600 South Broadway. Brock arranged a number of four-team doubleheaders, with local white semipro teams pairing off in the opening game and the Giants facing their opponents (black or white) in the second game. The white clubs, however, objected strenuously to their games serving essentially as opening acts for a black team, and the Giants soon moved their home games back to Handlan’s Park, which had been expanded and refurbished for use by the Federal League’s St. Louis Terriers, and was now known as Federal League Park.
The stadium was still owned by its namesake, Mr. Handlan, but Phil Ball, owner of the Terriers, maintained his lease on the park, even after the Federal League folded following the conclusion of the 1915 season. Ball bought the American League’s Browns and their home field, Sportsman’s Park. It was evidently Ball who hired out the now vacated Federal League Park to the St. Louis Giants in late summer, 1916; but by the following spring he had come to regret doing so. Eddie Brock, still the Giants’ main financial backer at this point, secured a five-year lease starting when Ball’s lease was set to expire, on April 9, 1917. The St. Louis Argus (April 6, 1917, p. 8) picks up the story from here:
“Brock has been having some trouble with Phil Ball, owner of the Browns, who it seems is anxious to keep the Negro team out of the park at Grand and Laclede. Brock has signed the leading stars on the diamond for this season and the Giants bid fair to outdraw the American League Club. Ball’s lease expires April 9 and to handicap the colored club he attempted to remove the seats from the grandstand. This being against the law and contrary to agreement with Mr. Handlan [still the park’s owner], [Ball] was enjoined by Brock.” (Thanks to Dwayne Isgrig for sending me this story.)
From late July through September, 1916, the St. Louis Giants had played major black opponents in Federal Park on the same day the Browns were in town at least 15 times. I don’t have any attendance figures for the Giants’ games, so it’s not clear how likely it was that they might have outdrawn the Browns, but there is definitely support for the notion that Ball might have feared the Giants’ cutting into his receipts.
I don’t know exactly what happened then. Perhaps Ball was able to prolong his lease on the park, or maybe Brock changed his plans, but for whatever reason the Giants were never able to play in Federal League Park that season. They used Brock’s Park a few times early on, along with Polo Park in East St. Louis (19th St. and Lynch Avenue).
So the Giants soldiered on through active hostility from the St. Louis Browns. But that would not be their most formidable obstacle in 1917. On May 20 the Giants faced the Nebraska Indians at Polo Park, edging former major league pitcher Jim Bluejacket 7 to 6. Eight days later a riot broke out in East St. Louis, as gangs of whites, angered by the importation of black workers from the South as strikebreakers, attacked random black people in the street as well as black-owned or patronized businesses (saloons, barber shops, restaurants). The governor of Illinois had to call out the National Guard. Unsurprisingly, the St. Louis Giants appear not to have used Polo Park again that season. Coincidentally or not, the team appears to have lost a number of its best players around this time, as men such as Jimmie Lyons, Charlie Blackwell, Bill Gatewood, and captain Bill Pettus moved on to other major black teams.
By late June the Giants were attempting to reorganize, with Charlie Mills again as business manager. Eddie Brock was evidently out of the picture and the club was now backed by black capital, with a saloon owner named Langston Harrison and another man named John H. Haynes behind the venture. But on July 1 violence broke out again in East St. Louis, this time more vicious and on a much grander scale. Between 100 and 150 black people were shot, burned, beaten, and clubbed to death by white rioters in what the St. Louis Globe-Democrat called a “blood orgy.”
In the wake of such insanity, the St. Louis Giants appear to have kept a low profile in the St. Louis area, if they played at all after June. In 1918, with the aftermath of the riots as well as World War I taking center stage, Mills seems to have chosen not to field a team at all. But the following year everything changed.
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