Agate Type

orator o’rourke upholds padrón’s right to play

  
Hall of Famer James “Orator” O’Rourke and Cuban pitcher/outfielder Luis Padrón crossed paths in the 1908 Connecticut League.

While I’m doing Luis Padrón updates, here’s a piece I ran across recently from the Springfield Republican, July 24, 1908.  Padrón, along with fellow Cubans Armando Marsans, Rafael Almeida, and Alfredo Cabrera, was playing for the New Britain club of the Connecticut League.  Controversy swirled around them due to rumors about their racial identity, especially that of Padrón.  In July the manager of the Springfield club, Dan O’Neil, teamed up with the recently-fired New Britain manager, Allie Paige (pictured in the previous post), to assert that Padrón was black in an attempt to get him banned. 

All attention focused on a league meeting scheduled for July 17, but in the end O’Neil declined to bring up the subject.  It’s unclear exactly why—but this article may suggest a reason.  It seems that the grand old man of the Connecticut League, nineteenth-century star Jim O’Rourke, had something to say on the subject.

True to his reputation as a clubhouse lawyer, “Orator” O’Rourke looked into the rules, and couldn’t find anything “that would deny a negro the right to play.”  And so for the 1908 season at least, the controversy was laid to rest—although of the four Cuban players with the 1908 New Britains, only Padrón did not return the following season.

UPDATE 5:50 pm The Padrón image above is from Cubanball.com’s fantastic page on the Cabañas card set commemorating the Detroit Tigers visit to Cuba in 1909.

luis padrón, righthander

As an addendum to the article on Luis Padrón I published a while back in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, here’s the smoking gun on the question of Padrón’s throwing hand: a team photo of the New Britain club of the 1908 Connecticut League.  Padrón is in the front row on the far left (as we look at the photo), right in front of Armando Marsans.  The photo hasn’t been accidentally reversed, as we can tell from the “N” in the New Britain logo on their jerseys; and Padrón is wearing a glove on his left hand, showing him to have thrown right-handed.  (Whereas Juan Padrón, the younger, Cuban-American pitcher he has been confused with, was without question a southpaw.)

Apologies for the quality of the image, which comes from an online digital version of the Hartford Courant (April 29, 1908, page 10).  I cited this photo in the Base Ball article, but didn’t actually reprint the image, for obvious reasons.  There are probably actual prints of this photograph floating around somewhere, or at least a hard copy of the Courant, from which a much better version of the image could be scanned.

pete hill’s historical marker, annotated

As you may have heard, the state of Virginia is placing a marker commemorating Pete Hill on the grounds of the Cedar Grove Baptist Church in Buena, Culpeper County, Virginia.  It joins a batch of new markers at various sites related to African American history, women’s suffrage, and the War of 1812—the most notable, perhaps, being a marker for Henrietta Lacks.

I worked with some folks at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to develop the text of the marker.  Here’s the final version:

PETE HILL (1882-1951)

John Preston “Pete” Hill, Negro League baseball player and manager, was born nearby, on 12 Oct., probably 1882, and likely to formerly enslaved parents. Banned from whites-only major leagues, Hill became a star outfielder for African American teams, notably the Philadelphia Giants and Chicago American Giants.  A Cuban League 1910/11 winter-season batting champion (with a .365 average), Hill hit 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 (when Babe Ruth hit 29 in more games), marking Hill as among black baseball’s earliest power hitters. Hill died on 19 Dec. 1951 and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

I wrote a first draft, then we edited and compressed it down to 101 words so it would fit on the sign.  It’s not perfect, but it does the job, I think.

I thought I would go ahead and provide an annotated version of the marker text, so you can see the sources and the reasoning behind some of the choices we made.

John Preston “Pete” Hill, Negro League baseball player and manager, was born nearby, on 12 Oct., probably 1882, and likely to formerly enslaved parents.

A vast constellation of documents confirms John Preston Hill’s identity as the ballplayer Pete Hill, and Hill’s place and date of birth.  Most important are his World War I draft card (which gives October 12, 1882, but no place of birth), his death certificate (October 12, 1882, Virginia), the 1900 U.S. census (October 1882, Virginia), the 1920 U.S. census (ca. 1884, Virginia), and his Form SS-5, Hill’s application for a Social Security number (October 12, 1884, Rapidan, Virginia).  (Another Social Security document lists his birth date as October 12, 1883.)  A 1916 passenger list gives his birthplace as “Buena Vista, Va.,” which might be a mistaken reference to Buena, a small community just north of Rapidan in Culpeper County.  Hill’s family in Pittsburgh was pretty well-known, and coverage in the Pittsburgh Courier, along with census records, confirmed their origins in Culpeper County and neighboring Orange County.

We don’t have specific documentation of his parents’ slave status before the end of the Civil War, but they were both apparently born in Virginia in the 1850s, so it seems highly likely that they were enslaved.

Banned from whites-only major leagues, Hill became a star outfielder for African American teams, notably the Philadelphia Giants and Chicago American Giants.  A Cuban League 1910/11 winter-season batting champion (with a .365 average), Hill hit 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 (when Babe Ruth hit 29 in more games), marking him as among black baseball’s earliest power hitters.

My own compilation of Cuban League box scores from the 1910/11 season (unpublished as of yet, but hopefully soon to be posted at Baseball-Reference.com) indicates a .391 average for Hill (36 for 92), but .365 (35 for 96) is the official figure cited in Jorge S. Figueredo, Cuban Baseball: A Statistical History, 1878-1961).   The Cuban League at that time was notorious for “adjusting” statistics after the season, particularly those pertaining to the prestigious batting title, so I tend to think that the statistics I compile straight from the box scores are more reliable than official numbers.  Nevertheless I decided that an historical marker required official sourcing whenever possible. 

Early drafts included the oft-cited factoid that in 1911 Hill hit safely in 115 of 116 games, but I could find only secondary sources for that, and decided to go with his remarkable home run total in 1919 instead. It’s a new piece of information, one that doesn’t appear in any of the standard reference books, statistical compilations, or Negro league histories.  As such it stands in for the new wave of Negro league research, one that obviously works a lot better for a general audience than trying to explain in a pithy phrase or two that he walked a lot or had a high on-base percentage or played a bunch of his career in an offense-killing home park, which are the other major results of recent research.  For whatever reason, until very recently nobody had done extensive research on the Detroit Stars’ 1919 season (or at least nobody had published it), so Hill’s home run production that year had been entirely forgotten.

It was, however, known at the time. Hill’s home run count was continually publicized by the Detroit Stars as the 1919 season progressed.  Hill himself touted it in a press release printed in the Chicago Defender (January 10, 1920):

(For the whole story of Hill’s 1919 season, see my article, “1919: A Tale of Two Sluggers,” in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, June  8, 2010, as well as the two-part series, “The Year Before the Negro National League,” also in the OBB, September 1 & September 8, 2010.)

By the way, this is the original sentence I wrote: “His total of 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 marked the end of the deadball era in black baseball.”  But the people at the Department of Historic Resources thought that the reference to the “deadball era” would confuse those who weren’t baseball history buffs.  In explaining what I meant, I mentioned Babe Ruth’s 29 home runs the same year, and we ended up deciding that Ruth’s was a name everyone recognized, and that comparing Hill’s season to his would help the uninitiated grasp the significance of Hill’s accomplishments.

I did have some reservations about the comparison: Pete Hill was really nothing like Babe Ruth, in kind or degree, and of course I dislike the old habit of talking about Negro leaguers as the black version of some white star or other.  But, just as Spottswood Poles was called the “black Ty Cobb” by his manager Ed Bolden, it was Pete Hill who compared himself to Ruth.  As the comparison was made in contemporary sources and by the subject himself, it seemed legitimate.

Hill died on 19 Dec. 1951 and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

His death date has been confirmed by his death certificate and by a Fay Young column in the Chicago Defender (December 29, 1951), in which Young notes the death of “Pete Hill, the grand old man of baseball,” on “Wednesday of last week [December 19] in Buffalo, N. Y., where in recent years he had made his home.”  So far this is the only contemporary newspaper mention of  Hill’s death I’ve been able to find.

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.

blue ridge colored baseball league, 1921

There is still a huge amount of regional black baseball history out there to be unearthed.  Numerous small (and usually short-lived) black baseball circuits were scattered around the country that went virtually unnoticed in the national (and even local) press at the time, and have been almost completely forgotten since. The year 1921, for example, produced a bumper crop of small black baseball leagues across the south.  I know of at least four—the Negro Southern League, the Negro Southeastern League, and the granddaddy of them all, the Texas Colored League, along with a North Carolina league that I just ran across for the first time today.  From the Charlotte Observer, March 22, 1921:

I’ve found references to two of the other teams, the Charlotte Red Sox and the Spartanburg Sluggers, but have no idea how long the Blue Ridge Colored League lasted, assuming it even got off the ground.  Whatever its fate, the league’s existence serves as a reminder of the now nearly invisible substratum of town teams and amateur and semi-pro ball that fed players to the big Negro league clubs.

the murder of walter dickey

Mark Aubrey has got a series of posts up about Walter Claude “Steel Arm” Dickey (mentioned briefly in this post), a lefthanded pitcher who toiled mostly for southern teams, but appeared briefly with the St. Louis Stars of the Negro National League in 1922, before he was murdered in Etowah, Tennessee, in 1923.

As Mark notes, there are numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the various accounts of Dickey’s death.  Unsuprisingly the two white sources (the Chattanooga and Knoxville newspapers) see Dickey and his “crowd” as the aggressors, with the white killer, Waldo Keyes, acting in self-defense and escaping in an automobile that just happened to be passing by.  The two black sources (the Chicago Defender and Cool Papa Bell) say Keyes was the aggressor; the Defender says he arrived with companions in what would be his getaway car.  Anyway, you can read Mark’s posts and the articles and come to your own conclusions.

A tangential note: the Chicago Defender article, unlike the Knoxville and Chattanooga papers, is keenly aware of the racial geography of the area.  It makes sure to point out first that Dickey was murdered in the “Jim Crow section” of Etowah—that is, the very small black neighborhood—and, crucially, that after the killing Keyes fled to Copperhill, a small town right on the Georgia state line.  The Defender article chooses its phrasing carefully, calling Copperhill “a city that is dangerous for any person of color to even pass through in the day time.”  “Sundown towns” were southern communities where blacks might work, but could not live, and were expected to clear out by sundown.  In other words, the Defender was linking Keyes to a place it considered even worse than a sundown town.