Agate Type

santa clara’s 1922-23 record

As I said yesterday, in the Seamheads DB we’ve got the 1922-23 Santa Clara team in the Cuban League going 15-12-1 in actually played games, as opposed to 14-13, as other sources have it.  Here’s a more detailed explanation.

As of January 12, 1923, Santa Clara stood in second place with a 14-12 record, behind Almendares at 14-11, with Marianao trailing at 11-12.   The “G” (“ganados”) column down gives wins, the “P” (“perdidos”) row across gives you losses.

(El Mundo, January 12, 1923, p. 9)

The following day, Marianao protested the first game of a doubleheader they had played in Santa Clara the previous Sunday, on the grounds that it hadn’t originally been scheduled as a doubleheader.  The teams had split the two games, Santa Clara taking the morning game, Marianao winning in the afternoon. 

The league voted to throw out the morning game, taking a win from Santa Clara and a loss from Marianao.  This reduced Santa Clara’s record to 13-12, and improved Marianao’s to 11-11.  That day (January 13) Marianao beat Almendares and Santa Clara beat Habana, making Marianao 12-11, and returning Santa Clara to 14-12, tied for first with Almendares. But in games actually played to this point, Santa Clara was 15-12 and Marianao 12-12.

(El Mundo, January 14, 1923, p. 14)

 

On January 14, Santa Clara announced they were leaving the league.  That day Marianao again beat Almendares, and Santa Clara refused to play against Habana, thus forfeiting that game.  This made Marianao 13-11, Almendares 14-13, and Santa Clara 14-13, the 13 losses already including one forfeit.

(El Mundo, January 15, 1923, p. 11)

 

When it became clear that Santa Clara’s decision was permanent, the league then forfeited their entire remaining schedule, giving wins to the other three teams, and saddling Santa Clara with a horrendous 14-40 official record.

(El Mundo, January 18, 1923, p. 10)

negro leagues DB update: 1922-23 cuban league

We're making a small but important addition to the DB today—the 1922/23 Cuban winter league, plus a few additional games for 1916, 1919, and 1922.

After a few seasons of turbulence in the Cuban game, the 1922/23 season marked a new beginning.  The league added two new teams, Santa Clara and Marianao, to the Habana-Almendares duopoly.  Santa Clara was run by Tinti Molina, who put together the most famous outfield in Cuban baseball history: Alejandro Oms (.411) in left, Oscar Charleston (.418) in center, and Pablo Mesa (.286) in right.  Molina also added lefty Dave Brown (5-4, 2.47) and a few other stateside stars, and the Leopardos sprinted to the league lead---but after a victory over Marianao was thrown out by league authorities, Santa Clara angrily withdrew.  They would be vindicated the following winter, when the 1923-24 Santa Clara Leopardos emerged as the most legendary team in Cuban history, the island's equivalent of the 1927 Yankees.

Of the three remaining teams, Almendares could boast of outfielders  Bernardo Baró (.403/.452/.544) and Valentín Dreke (.324), manager-shortstop Joseíto Rodríguez (.316), and minor league southpaw Eddie LePard (7-5, 2.17), but Habana would probably have been considered the favorite.  Los Leones featured both the best everyday player in Cuban baseball at the time, Cristóbal Torriente (.344/.435/.515) and the best Cuban pitcher (and perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, period), Dolf Luque.  In 1923, Luque would go 27-8 with a 1.93 ERA for the Cincinnati Reds.  In the 1922/23 Cuban League, he went 11-7, 1.53.

Yet both of these traditional powers fell short in the end.  It was the brand new Marianao club, led by player-manager Merito Acosta, that claimed a surprise championship.  Acosta himself contributed a .282 average and a league-leading 32 walks.  Right-hander Lucas Boada was acclaimed as "el nuevo diamante negro" ("the new black diamond"; that is, the new José Méndez) as he tied Luque with 11 victories.  Veterans José María Fernández  (.304), Manuel Cueto (.288), and Pelayo Chacón (.307) also played important roles in what was a true team effort for Marianao.

The Marianao club, champions of the 1922-23 Cuban League.

A couple of important notes:

1) We are still missing box scores for six games, all of them Santa Clara home games.  Since the Leopardos won four of those six games, the Santa Clara players are probably slightly disadvantaged in the stats we're able to present.

2) You may notice that other sources have Santa Clara going 14-13, rather than 15-12, as we've got it here.  We've checked this very carefully, and 15-12 is the correct W/L record for games actually played.  I'll write this up in more detail in the next couple of days.

In the works for the DB: 1925 & 1934 Negro leagues, East-West All-Star Games, Mexican League 1937-1954, Cuban League 1918-19, 1919-20, 1920-21, and 1927-28, and much more.

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

sam mongin & the 1915 lincoln stars

Currently up for auction at Hake’s is this photo of the 1915 New York Lincoln Stars:

It’s a great photograph, despite the damage to Judy Gans’s face and the somewhat inartful trimming done on some of the players in the back row (especially Pierce and Lloyd).  It’s particularly significant to me because it provides the first clear photograph of Sam Mongin I’ve seen.  In the Seamheads DB so far, he is one of the most prominent players still lacking a good photo (he’s 68th in games played; all 67 players above him have photos).

These are the best images of Mongin I’d come across previously:

(St. Louis Argus, June 17, 1921; courtesy of Dwayne Isgrig)

(Chicago Defender, July 16, 1921)

 

There was also this photograph of the 1915 Breakers Hotel team in Palm Beach, Florida:



I had identified everybody in this photograph except for the first player on the left in both the back and middle rows.  It seems pretty obvious that the one in the middle row is Sam Mongin (which means that the guy in the back row must be Jesse Barber).  So now it looks like this:

Back row L to R: Jesse Barber, Dick Redding, John Henry Lloyd, Judy Gans, Louis Santop, Leroy Grant.

Middle row: Sam Mongin, Dicta Johnson, Joe Williams, Bill Pettus, Bill Francis.

Front row: Pete Hill, Knucks James, Dick Wallace, Spottswood Poles.

a marker for pete hill’s grave

This is the marker Jeremy Krock and the Negro Leagues Baseball Grave Marker Project arranged for the burial site of Pete Hill at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. I received the photo from Ron Hill a few months back; I don’t know if the marker has already been placed or not.

fabré & padrón

Courtesy of Ryan Christoff, here are some more photos of Isidro Fabré and Juan Padrón.  First, a fantastic photograph of Isidro Fabré in an Almendares cap and Cuban Stars sweater:

Second, here are the 1921 New York Cuban Stars, with Fabré and Padrón the last two players standing in the back row on the right (note how much taller Padrón is; click on the picture to enlarge):

 

Standing L to R: Pelayo Chacón, Vicente Rodríguez, Joaquín Barceló, José Junco, Alejandro Pompez, Pablo Mesa, Isidro Fabré, Juan Padrón.

Kneeling or sitting L to R: Mario Borroto, Recurvon Terán, Tatica Campos, Juanelo Mirabal, Alejandro Oms, Oscar Levis, Julián Fabelo.

And here’s a detail of Fabré and Padrón:

settled

Back in 2011 Brian Campf sent me this marvelous photograph of Juan Padrón with the New York Cuban Stars, ca. 1920:

After I posted it, a couple of readers noted that the same image had been identified as Isidro Fabré.  At the time this is what I wrote to one of them:

“It's an interesting case, since Fabré & Padrón played for the same team (NY Cuban Stars) at the same time.  But I think it's pretty easy, when you look at it, to tell them apart.  Attached are juxtapositions of the Padrón photo with both the Fabré you sent and another image of Fabré which is probably a little better for these purposes, as it's more head on.  The entire structure of the lower face is different, with Fabré having more of a square chin and a narrower face; their noses are quite different; their eyebrows are different; Fabré's lips are fuller; Fabré's right ear, while similar to Padrón at the top, is shorter.

“I've also attached an image showing the Padrón photo juxtaposed with a photo of the older Padrón, probably in the 1950s, which I obtained from his family.  You can see other images of Padrón from the 1970s here.”

Here are the juxtaposed images, the first two pairings showing the above image on the left and confirmed images of Isidro Fabré on the right, the third pairing showing a photograph of the older Juan Padrón, given to me by his family, on the right.

The photo in question on the left, two different images of Isidro Fabré on the right.

Brian’s photo again on the left, a photograph of Juan Padrón from the 1950s on the right.

And if that doesn’t convince you, this might: I found Brian’s photograph in the Havana newspaper El Mundo (January 7, 1923), identified as Juan Padrón, “the left-handed pitcher of Habana” (he pitched for Habana in the 1922-23 winter league season).

the rogans of sumner county, tennessee

A couple of months ago I was trying to determine whether or not Oscar Rogan, a lefthanded semipro pitcher in Indiana in the late 1910s, was related to Wilber “Bullet” Rogan, the Hall of Fame pitcher for the 25th Infantry Wreckers and Kansas City Monarchs.  I was able to establish that Bullet Rogan’s family history could be traced back to Sumner County, Tennessee, which was where Oscar Rogan was born.  Going back to the 1870 census, however, I couldn’t find any solid evidence showing whether or how their two families were related.  And then we run into the slavery line.  Prior to the Civil War, the census did not record the names of individual slaves.  The slave schedules merely listed the owner’s name along with only the slaves’ ages. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t figure out anything in the slavery era.  The 1870 census shows 49 African Americans surnamed “Rogan” living in Sumner County, along with 10 white Rogans. In the 1860 census, Francis Rogan of Sumner County owned 71 slaves (and William Rogan 5 more).  In the 1850 census Francis Rogan owned 57 slaves.  It seems very likely that the black Rogans of post-war Sumner County were largely the same people (or their descendants), meaning that the Rogan name can be traced back to the Francis Rogan family. 

The Rogans were major landowners and the most prominent Catholics in an otherwise heavily Protestant area; some of the buildings on their property still exist (including the original stone cabin built around 1800 by Hugh Rogan, Francis’s father and an Irish immigrant).  You can read about their slaves and their families here—though it appears that the researcher hasn’t realized that a descendant of the Rogan slaves became a Hall of Fame ballplayer.

The Francis Rogan house (right; 1827) and Hugh Rogan house (1800), from the Middle Tennessee State University site on the Rogan family.

Let me stop here to point out one historical celebrity among the Rogans of Sumner County, someone who’s probably related to Bullet and Oscar: John William “Bud” Rogan (not to be confused with Bullet’s grandfather, also named John Rogan).  Bud Rogan never stopped growing during his life, eventually reaching the height of 8 feet, nine inches before his death at the age of 37 (roughly) as a result of complications from his condition.  At one point he weighed as much as 300 pounds, though he had wasted away to 175 by the time he died. 

Bullet Rogan stood 5’7” and weighed 160 pounds; Oscar Rogan was almost exactly the same size, 5’6 ½”, 160.  According to military records, their grandfathers were, respectively, 5’ 4 ¼” and 5’6”.  The Rogans were fairly small men, even for the times.  And yet they may have been related to the second-tallest human being in recorded history.

Bud Rogan

Anyway: Bullet’s father, Richard Rogan, was born in either 1862 or 1863 (the 1900 census says March 1863).  It’s certainly possible that he was born into slavery, as the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) did not cover Tennessee, which was already largely in Union hands by that time, and the pro-unionist state government did not outlaw slavery until it ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in April, 1865.  So I can’t say for sure whether Bullet was the son of former slaves, or the grandson. 

But Tennessee’s military governor, future president Andrew Johnson, freed his own slaves on August 8, 1863.  It’s possible that Francis Rogan followed a similar path, and emancipated his slaves around this time.  Union forces occupied Sumner County in February, 1862, and the county seat, Gallatin, became an important logistics hub for federal forces (and target of Confederate raids).  Here, on October 1, 1863, six men named Rogan enlisted in the 14th United States Colored Infantry—including both John (aged 39; Bullet’s grandfather) and Wesley (38; Oscar’s), as well as Benjamin (25), Jacob (25), Page (24), and Titus (18).  A seventh, 22-year-old Clinton Rogan, joined on November 1. 

Although I still have no idea what their actual relationship was, it’s easy to imagine the two older Rogans as brothers.  John spent the war as a cook for Company A, while Wesley was a cook in Company D.  During their service the 14th Colored Infantry served as garrison troops and railroad guards and saw action at the Second Battle of Dalton, Georgia (August 1864), the siege of Decatur, Alabama (October 1864), and the decisive Battle of Nashville (December  1864). Young Clinton Rogan died of “bilious pneumonia” at the post hospital in Chattanooga on December 2, 1865, but John and Wesley and, as far as I can tell, the rest of the Sumner County Rogans survived the war.

In the end we still don’t know exactly how Oscar Rogan and Bullet Rogan were related, though I’m pretty sure someone out there (particularly someone in the Rogan family) knows a lot more about all this.

 

mackey & campanella, 1959

One of the most famous tributes in baseball history, probably second only to Lou Gehrig’s 1939 farewell, took place on May 7, 1959.  That night a crowd of 93,000 packed the Los Angeles Coliseum to watch the Dodgers and Yankees play an exhibition game to honor Roy Campanella, about 15 months after the car accident that had left him paralyzed.

Courtesy of Bill Staples, here’s the first photo I’ve seen of Campy that night with his longtime mentor (and now fellow Hall of Famer) Biz Mackey.  The quality is, unfortunately, not great—but surely a print of this exists somewhere? 

(California Eagle, May 14, 1959, p. 7)

Mackey, it should be noted, actually had more of a baseball connection to Los Angeles than Campanella, having played for many years in the California Winter League.