Agate Type

elias bryant

(Warren PA Times-Mirror, June 18, 1930, p. 11)

Back in 2008 I wrote about the murder of Elias Bryant, who played baseball under the name of “Circus Country Brown” and was known for his on-field comedy act. In 2010, I posted his death certificate—which, incidentally, showed that he was buried in Frederick Douglass Cemetery on Staten Island, the same cemetery where Sol White was buried (and where a new headstone for White was dedicated a couple of weeks ago). I understand that the Negro Leagues Grave Marker Project is now focusing on getting a headstone for Bryant.

As I noted at the time, the death certificate didn’t give any specific information about Bryant’s birth date. However: as JR pointed out in the comments last week, the Puerto Rico passenger list from 1925 that showed the combined team of Lincoln Giants and Royal Giants travelling to San Juan included one Elias Brown, born March 28, 1896, Atlanta, Georgia.

There’s a possible connection in the 1900 census, where an African American child named Elias Bryant, born March 1899 in Georgia, is residing with his family in Gainesville, Hall County, Georgia:

One big problem is that the parents of this Elias Bryant are named Elias and Emma, whereas the ballplayer’s death certificate says his parents were named Henry Bryant and Louisa Gant. So despite the coincidence of the birth month (March) with the 1925 passenger list, this is not 100 percent certain to be Elias Bryant the ballplayer.

A couple of other interesting items related to Brown/Bryant. In the April 17, 1920, New York Age we’re given this list of Atlantic City Bacharach Giants players coming north from spring training:

(New York Age, April 17, 1920, p. 7)

(Yes, it’s that Home Run Johnson.) “Fielder Brown” from Morris Brown College is, I believe, our Country Brown. Not sure why he’s going by the name “Fielder Brown,” unless it was a middle name or maybe an early nom de guerre before he settled on Elias Brown. (“Brown,”by the way, could be a reference to his alma mater.) At any rate, Elias Bryant appears in the 1920 Atlantic City directory with “Ball Player” given as his occupation:

He appears in the 1921 directory at the same address, still “Ball Player,” but not in the directory for 1922—when he joined the Bacharachs team that moved to New York City.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, when he played for Nat Strong’s Royal Giants as they barnstormed through Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and elsewhere, he was commonly billed as a vaudeville artist, which I used to think was just a reference to his baseball comedy—but I’ve found a few articles claiming that he did actually perform on stage during the off season. (James Riley says Brown’s wife was an actress.) A note in the Franklin, Pennsylvania, News-Herald puts him with the Keith Circuit in 1930:

(Franklin News-Herald, June 17, 1930, p. 13)

Brown also sometimes liked to exaggerate his age, a common publicity ploy among Negro league players. In 1934, for example, when he was at most 38 years old, he was reported several times to be 48.

Lastly, how about a sample of Bryant's humor. Here’s a story told by his manager Dick Redding in 1934:

(Syracuse Journal, June 22, 1934, p. 32)

Here’s another from the Harrisburg Telegraph in 1927:

(Harrisburg Telegraph, June 28, 1927, p. 12)

UPDATE 5/29/2014 Edited to add a couple of additional items.

UPDATE 5/30/2014 According to his death certificate Bryant was not on the vaudeville circuit during that off season, but rather working for the WPA. But he was still playing ball in 1937, the summer before his death. His last team was the New York Colored Stars, a barnstorming outfit managed by Bunny Downs and starring Brown, Nip Winters, and Arvell Riggins.

(Warren, Pennsylvania, Times Mirror, August 7, 1937, p. 2)

UPDATE 6/4/2014 The latest on Elias Bryant.

benjamin harrison sees the big gorhams

Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President of the United States; Stanislaus Kostka Govern, manager of the New York Gorhams.

 

A couple of years ago I wrote about Cubs owner Charles P. Taft attending, and enjoying, a Leland Giants game in 1908 during the Republican Convention that nominated his brother, William Howard Taft, for the presidency of the United States. The younger Taft duly won the election that November, and went on to invent the tradition of the President throwing out the first ball of the major league season. This, I thought, marked the closest approach between the Negro leagues and the White House during the whole era of segregated baseball. I was wrong.

It was summer, 1891. The White House was under renovation and uninhabitable for several months. Benjamin Harrison, now known mainly as the answer to various trivia questions involving Grover Cleveland, repaired with his wife to Cape May Point, New Jersey, where his Postmaster General, John Wanamaker, had given him a vacation cottage. This would later cause a minor scandal, with Harrison finally writing a $10,000 check to Wanamaker to cover the cost of the gift. But that summer, the cottage at Cape May became the White House on the Jersey Shore, with the president entertaining cabinet members and ambassadors, meeting with legislators and judges, and conducting the nation’s business—when he wasn’t attending concerts and strolling along the beach…or attending baseball games.

On August 15, the President, accompanied by Pennsylvania State Senator John E. Reyburn, went to Cape May’s Athletic Park to witness a game between the local semipro nine, the Cape May Athletic Association, and the New York Colored Gorhams. Managed by S. K. Govern, this was the team that was known as the “Big Gorhams,” because it brought together nearly all the top black stars of the day, most of them former Cuban Giants: George Williams, Arthur Thomas, Billy Selden, eventual Hall of Famers Sol White and Frank Grant. White would later write that the Big Gorhams were “without a doubt one of the strongest teams ever gotten together, white or black” (Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, p. 25). With Selden in the box, they dispatched the locals handily, 5 to 0:

(Philadelphia Inquirer, August 16, 1891, p. 3)

Harrison, it was reported, “appeared very much interested in the game and applauded all the good plays”:

(Washington Post, August 16, 1891, p. 1)

As far as I know, Benjamin Harrison was the only sitting President of the United States to watch a game involving a black professional team during the whole era of segregated baseball. I had never really thought much about this until I ran across this game by accident while looking for something else, so I could easily be wrong—if anybody knows about another case, fill me in.

UPDATE 5/26/2014 According to John Thorn, Harrison also became, on June 6, 1892, the first sitting president to attend a major league baseball game.

UPDATE 5.29.2014 Turns out Scott Simkus beat me to the punch on this game in the July 11, 2012, issue of Outsider Baseball Bulletin.

the latest on chino smith

New research in passenger lists has increased confidence that we’ve got the right man in the search for Dobie Moore. It’s done the same for Charles “Chino” Smith, the legendarily pugnacious high-average hitter for the Lincoln Giants and Royal Giants in the late 1920s.

Smith is usually said (based probably on Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia) to have been born in 1903 (no specific date) in Greenwood, South Carolina. However, back in 2011 I wrote that I had found a passenger list showing George Scales returning from Puerto Rico in the spring of 1926, after spending the winter there along with a whole team of Negro leaguers from New York (members of the Lincoln Giants and Royal Giants). Listed right below Scales was one Charles Smith, born September 24, 1901, in “Hamet,” North Carolina. While there is no Hamet in either of the Carolinas, there is a Hamlet, North Carolina, in Richmond County, right on the border with South Carolina.

Recently I came across a passenger list which showed all of the Negro league players travelling together and arriving in Puerto Rico on November 25, 1925.

Here we have, along with Scales and the other players, Charles Smith, born on September 24, 1901—the same birthdate as the Charles Smith accompanying Scales back to the U.S. in March, 1926—except this time his birth place is listed as “Society Hall,” South Carolina.

It so happens that, based on Smith’s death certificate, I was able to find his family in South Carolina in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census. In the last two the Smith family, including Charlie, lived in Society Hill, Darlington County, South Carolina—which is just 30 miles from Hamlet, North Carolina. It seems inescapable that the Charles Smith on the 1925 list of passengers arriving in Puerto Rico is the same person as the Charles Smith on the 1926 list of passengers arriving in New York, and that both are the ballplayer Chino Smith.

But what about the conflicting birth places—“Society Hall” (Society Hill), South Carolina, and “Hamet,” North Carolina? There could many reasons for this. Smith clearly spent much of his childhood in Society Hill (at least from age 8 to 18, and possibly more), and we don’t know exactly how the information on these passenger lists was compiled. It could be that in one instance he was asked where he was born, and in another instance what his hometown was.

Whatever the reason, it turns out that on at least two more passenger lists, Smith gave “Hamlet, North Carolina,” correctly spelled, as his birth place. First, returning to the U.S. from Cuba after the Cuban winter season on January 17, 1927:

And again returning to the U.S. from Cuba on January 24, 1928, two days after playing in the last game of the 1927/28 Cuban League season:

While Smith’s census records in 1910, 1920, and 1930, plus his death certificate, list his birthplace as South Carolina (nothing more specific), three out of four passenger lists give Hamlet, North Carolina. We may never have anything more authoritative, since birth records from before about 1910 were not consistently kept, especially for African American children in the South. Based on what we do know, my inclination is to go with Hamlet.

Putting everything together, we’ve experienced kind of a revolution in our understanding of Chino Smith, at least in terms of some basic facts.

• Instead of being born in Greenwood, South Carolina, in 1903, he appears more likely to have been born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 24, 1901.

• As David Lawrence pointed out to me last year, he was not quite the 5’6” “compact dynamo” described by James Riley. Check out this photo of the Lincoln Giants at the first Negro league game in Yankee Stadium in 1930:

From left to right, here are the players pictured, along with their “official” heights from various sources: Jesse Hubbard (6’2”), John Henry Lloyd (5’11”), Nip Winters (6’5”), Chino Smith (5’6”), Bill Yancey (5’9”), Bill Holland (5’9”).  The disparities here show you some of the difficulties in determining player heights from this era. Hubbard and Lloyd look to be about the same height, whereas both Holland and Smith seem clearly a little taller than Yancey in between. Smith is a few inches shorter than Winters, but certainly not eleven inches shorter. Winters might have been more like 6’3” or so; even so, Smith looks more like he might have been 5’10” or 5’11”, perhaps an inch shorter than Lloyd. At any rate there’s really no way he was only 5’6”.

• During his career, he was called (without exception, that I’ve found) “Charlie Smith” in U.S. newspapers, never “Chino.” This is the basis for his appearing in the Seamheads DB as Charlie Smith (though I may change that, since our search box doesn’t call up nicknames, making it hard to find him). In my limited sampling of Cuban newspapers for the 1927/28 season, I’ve seen him referred to as “el chino” (in lower case), but not as “Chino Smith.” The earliest I’ve seen the nickname used as a proper name is in a column by Cumberland Posey in the Pittsburgh Courier for November 30, 1935, when Posey calls him “Cheno Smith.”

• His home park for his greatest seasons was the bizarrely tiny Catholic Protectory Oval, shaped like a miniature Polo Grounds, with the outfield fence only 180 feet away down the foul lines (although in the deepest part of the park the fences were 358 feet from home plate). While there’s no doubt he was a talented hitter (and we don’t know what kind of ground rules may have been in effect at the Protectory), the size and shape of his home field are facts that anybody who wants to assess him as a player will have to grapple with.

• As I have written before (first in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin in 2010, then in this post) according to his death certificate Charlie Smith did not die of yellow fever, but rather of stomach and pancreatic cancer.

the latest on dobie moore

Here’s the latest on the search for Walter “Dobie” Moore, the great Kansas City Monarchs and Santa Clara Leopardos shortstop. In case you haven’t been keeping track, see this and this.

To sum up: Dobie Moore, born in Atlanta sometime around 1896 or 1897, was known to be living in Detroit in the 1930s, along with a brother named Pete Moore who was also a ballplayer. On September 11, 1943, the Chicago Defender printed a photo of him, identifying him as a resident of Detroit. Less than a year and a half earlier, in April 1942, an African American man named Walter Moore, born February 8, 1896, in Atlanta, Georgia, registered for the draft in Detroit.

This particular Walter Moore and his family can be identified in both the 1930 and 1940 census in Detroit. His younger brother Allen is listed as a professional ballplayer in the 1930 census. And this Walter Moore, as Peter Morris discovered, died of a heart attack at his home in Detroit on August 20, 1947.

Everything seems to fit: he was born in Atlanta, lived in Detroit at the right time, his younger brother was a ballplayer (even though the names differ—were Pete Moore and Allen Moore the same person?). According to his death certificate, Walter Moore moved to Detroit in 1926—the very year Dobie Moore was shot and his Negro league career ended.

The only problem is…Dobie Moore was reported to have been a pallbearer at his old teammate George Carr’s funeral in Los Angeles in January, 1948. Six months later, in June 1948, he was reported to have been robbed by “three thugs” on a Chicago street. So the last two sightings of Dobie Moore alive took place after Walter Moore of Detroit died on August 20, 1947.

As I wrote last year:

These 1948 sightings of Dobie Moore could be mistakes.  And the circumstantial evidence linking this Walter Moore to the Monarch shortstop is pretty convincing.  But it would be great to get one solid link between this Walter and the ballplayer—something like a reference to Dobie’s younger brother Allen (rather than Pete), or anything giving the name of any of Dobie’s relatives, or a record or document that establishes Walter Moore of Detroit as a ballplayer himself.

To cut the suspense short: I think I’ve found a record that establishes a link between Dobie Moore the ballplayer and Walter Moore of Detroit. In the 1923/24 winter season, Dobie Moore starred for the greatest team in Cuban history, the Leopardos of Santa Clara. I’ve finally found a passenger list showing several of Santa Clara’s American players returning to the U.S., arriving at Key West aboard the steam packet Governor Cobb on March 17, 1924. (Click to enlarge.)

There’s no doubt this is Dobie Moore, as he is accompanied by several of his teammates: Dave Brown, Oliver Marcell, Frank Duncan, and Frank Warfield (Elvis Holland, a.k.a. Bill Holland, was originally scheduled to travel with them but didn’t make it aboard for whatever reason).

Moore is listed as born in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 6, 1897. This is very close, but not identical to, the February 8, 1895 or 1896 that records list for Walter Moore of Detroit. It’s worth noting that the other Negro league players on this passenger list are given birth dates that differ from other (generally quite reliable) records. From what I’ve seen, the passenger lists of this era are prone to errors and misreadings borne out of carelessness or haste, so such differences are not entirely surprising. So you can compare, here is the birth information for the other players from this list, compared with the birth information from other sources that I’ve used in the Seamheads DB:

• Dave Brown – February 5, 1896, Dallas Tex. / June 9, 1895, Leon County, Texas
• Oliver Marcell – January 14, 1896, New Orleans, La. / June 21, 1895, Thibodaux, La.
• Elvis Holland – February 28, 1901, Alexandria, Ind. / February 28, 1901, Indianapolis, Ind.
• Frank Duncan – February 9, 1901, Kansas City, Mo. / February 14, 1901, Kansas City, Mo.
• Frank Warfield – April 15, 1899, Indianapolis, Ind. / April 28, 1899, Indianapolis, Ind.

With the exception of the always slippery Dave Brown, the birth dates are at least similar (in Marcell’s case June, or Jun., could easily be mistaken for Jan.). Alexandria is a small township less than 50 miles from Indianapolis, while Thibodaux is about 60 miles from New Orleans. It’s very common to find people giving their birth place as a larger town or city near their actual birth place, especially later in life. And it’s equally common to see specific dates move around a little from record to record.

What I’m saying is that I think the birth information on this passenger list is, if not absolutely correct in every detail, approximately accurate—and that I think we can take the February 6, 1897, birth in Atlanta for Dobie Moore as a definite link to Walter Moore of Detroit, born on February 8, 1895 or 1896, in Atlanta. The “circumstantial” case (as I’ve called it) that Peter has found Dobie Moore’s death date is getting very strong, in my opinion.

If we’ve found Dobie Moore, by the way, that would mean he’s buried in Detroit Memorial Park East, in Macomb County, Michigan.

Here’s a list of links tracing the search for Dobie Moore beginning in 2007:

• Why all published birth and death information for Dobie Moore is wrong (October 20, 2007)
• Walter Moore’s WW2 draft card found (October 23, 2007)
• Image of Walter Moore’s WW2 draft card (February 8, 2013)
• Walter Moore’s death record found (April 30, 2013)
• Dobie Moore at George Carr funeral 1948 (April 30, 2013)
• Copy of Walter Moore’s death certificate; second 1948 sighting of Dobie Moore (May 9, 2013)

Credit belongs to John Bowman, who originally looked up Walter Moore’s World War II draft card; Peter Morris, who found Moore’s death record and tracked down his family; and Mark Aubrey, who pointed out that Moore’s brother Allen was listed as a ballplayer in 1930.

the *other* negro league you’ve never heard of: the international league of colored baseball clubs of america and cuba, 1909

You might have noticed that the latest update to the Seamheads Negro Leagues DB divides 1909 into “Western Independent Clubs” and something called the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs of America and Cuba.” What was that, and did it have anything to do with the (almost identically-named) National Association of Colored Baseball Clubs of the United States and Cuba of 1907 and 1908?

First, let’s lay out the evidence. In this post I cited newspaper articles referring to the National Association that were published on October 29, 1906; March 21, 1908; December 19, 1908; and December 18, 1909. (These, of course, aren’t the only articles that refer to the league by name—this is just a sampling to establish that there are contemporary sources giving the “National Association” name in reference to 1907, 1908, and 1909.) Moreover, Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, originally published in spring 1907, mentioned the National Association by name several times.

So the National Association, by that name, existed from 1907 to 1909, with four teams every year: Brooklyn Royal Giants, Cuban Giants, Cuban Stars, and Philadelphia Giants.

However, here are a few more pieces of evidence:

•In an update to Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide that covered the 1907 season, White referred to the “International League of Colored Base Ball Teams,” which oversaw a “colored championship” contest between the Philadelphia Giants, Cuban Giants, Royal Giants, and Cuban Stars—the same four teams that were in the National Association that year, according to newspaper sources.

• Throughout 1909 and 1910, Lester A. Walton of the New York Age kept talking about the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs of America and Cuba,” again a league featuring the same four times and same key personnel (Nat Strong, Sol White, H. Walter Schlichter, etc.). There are several examples of Walton using this name—it’s the only black league he refers to.

• And even Nat Strong’s December 18, 1909, letter to the Indianapolis Freeman (posted here), in which Strong identifies himself as business manager of the National Association, claimed that the Royal Giants were playing the Cuban Stars for the “International Colored Championship” (his caps; he sent another letter confirming that the Royals had won it).

So, what’s the deal here? Are these two different leagues? If so, why do they have seemingly the same membership? Did the National Association change its name to the International League at some point?

Lawrence D. Hogan, in Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball, spends several pages on the history of these years, and comes up with a rather complicated solution to the National Association / International League conundrum.

First, Hogan asserts that “William Freihoffer [sic] and John O’Rourke” founded the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs in America and Cuba” in 1906 (p. 104). He also apparently believes the 1906 International League to be continuous with the later mentions of an International League from 1907 through 1910 (as listed above).

He then writes that the “ILBCAC” (his acronym for the International League)  “was joined by the National Association of Colored Baseball Clubs of the United States and Cuba (NACBC)” in late 1906. Then at some point the International League “was absorbed into the NACBC, since the same clubs that made up the ILBCAC were also in NACBC members. League clubs played in the ILBCAC in the East, while they functioned under the umbrella of the NACBC during their barnstorming tours in the Midwest and Cuba” (p. 117). In other words, they were originally two separate leagues, but then they merged, with the International League as the name for the  pennant competition and the National Association the name of the Strong-run booking agency.

Hogan’s first point, I can say, is actually a mistake. The Freihofer/O’Rourke league, discussed here, was called the International League of Independent Professional Base Ball Clubs. The term “colored” was never used in its name. Moreover, it included two white semipro teams. In my opinion, a white American team in the U.S. in 1906 would have been extremely unlikely to join an organization that identified itself as “colored.” As far as I can tell, the Freihofer/O’Rourke league ceased to exist after the 1906 season. It had nothing to do with either the National Association (which was reported as a new league when it was founded) or the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs of America and Cuba” that Lester Walton wrote about in 1909.

As for his argument about the relationship between the National Association and the later International League: I have to say that it goes way beyond any actual evidence I’ve seen. In my opinion, the likeliest explanation for the seeming appearance of two simultaneous leagues with the same roster of teams is the simplest: the International League and the National Association were in fact the same organization. People were just confused about its name.

In part I think this was because they remembered the previous International League, the Freihofer/O’Rourke multicultural league of 1906; it might also be because it makes more sense for an organization with an actual Cuban team, and a full name that invokes both the United States and Cuba, to call itself the “International League,” rather than the “National Association.” There might be other explanations for this confusion, too, which I think are related to the reason the league failed in the end. I’ll discuss this in a future post.

By the way, in the Seamheads DB I’ve chosen to go with “National Association” for 1907 and 1908, because nearly all references to it during those years use that name. But I’ve gone with “International League” for 1909, when it becomes the favored name (largely due to Lester Walton, it must be said).

negro leagues DB update: 1923-24 cuban league

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

Possibly for the first time anywhere (and certainly for the first time in recent history) the Seamheads DB is presenting (nearly) complete statistics for both the 1923/24 Cuban League season as well as the 1924 Gran Premio that followed it. (We're missing only a single box score.)

The 1923/24 Santa Clara club is the most legendary team in Cuban history, the island's equivalent of the 1927 Yankees. Tinti Molina had taken the 1922/23 Santa Clara team, which might have been best in the league but had walked out after a mid-season dispute over a disallowed win, and added Dobie Moore, Reuben Curry, and Heavy Johnson of the NNL champion Kansas City Monarchs. The '23/'24 Leopardos featured its own Murderers' Row consisting of Moore, Oscar Charleston, Alejandro Oms, and Oliver Marcell, along with guest appearances by Johnson (for the first part of the season) and Esteban Montalvo (the team's fourth outfielder). Their pitching was solid, led by the Negro league trio of Curry, Dave Brown, and Bill Holland, along with Pedro Dibut (who would appear for the Cincinnati Reds in 1924). By mid-January the Leopardos were 36-11 and 11 ½ games ahead of second-place Habana, and the league called it quits.

The last-place Marianao Elefantes disbanded and the team's players were redistributed among the other three teams, and started a new competition, the Grand Winter Championship (Gran Premio Invernal), to be played in a split-season format, with the winners of the two halves facing off in a championship series at the end. Santa Clara won the first half. Not until the second half of this second season did the Leopardos falter, with Almendares taking the second-half title of the Gran Premio. By this time, however, it was March, and all three teams were starting to lose players to spring training in the U.S.---so the playoff between Almendares and Santa Clara was cancelled. When the won/lost records for the two halves of the Gran Premio were added up, Santa Clara came out on top again---barely.

Also, with the help of historian Todd Peterson, we've added a number of new games and teams for the years 1903 to 1913. In coming weeks we'll be adding the 1935 and 1936 Negro National League, the East-West All-Star Games, the Mexican League, the 1926 Eastern Colored League, and more Cuban League seasons.

The 1923/24 Santa Clara Leopardos.

rube speaks

During the winter of 1926, Wesley Rollo Wilson, the dean of east coast black sportswriters, conducted an interview with Rube Foster that has become a key text in the modern reconstruction of Negro league history. I first happened upon it because I was looking for more information about the confusion between Walter Ball and George “Georgia Rabbit” Washington—but there’s a lot more here.

It was really not so much an interview as an oration by Rube Foster with Wilson as stenographer.

 

(Pittsburgh Courier, January 16, 1926, p. 12)

This column has been used as the source for a number of oft-repeated nuggets, claims, and facts, not all of which are strictly speaking accurate, though by no means is it a totally unreliable source. There are a few small corrections you could make to this column. Rube’s years are a little off sometimes—Pete Hill didn’t leave for Chicago until a year after Foster did, in 1907, for example, and Rube joined the Philadelphia Giants in 1904 rather than 1903—but these are trivial.

These are a few of the more interesting (and questionable, or in one case misquoted) claims that have been frequently cited and repeated, but only rarely (if ever) actually examined:

•Rube Foster names the 1910 Leland Giants “the greatest ball team in the history of the game, BAR NONE!”—and claims that the Leland Giants “won 123 games and lost 6.” I haven’t tried to compile all the games for the 1910 Lelands, but they did win 22 and lose only 2 (while tying 1) against black professional teams. In Cuba in the fall of 1910, however, they won 7, lost 5, and tied one—making their overall record against Cuban and “Negro league” teams for the calendar year 29-7-2. I’d guess Rube wasn’t counting Cuban games.

•Rube considered Bill Monroe “the greatest player who ever lived and one who would have been a star in any league. Ask John McGraw—he knows.” I think this quote has been a garbled a little and transformed into McGraw (rather than Foster) declaring Monroe “the greatest player of all time” (for example, see Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, p. 561).

•Rube claims that the heavyweight champ Jack Johnson—“Yes, THE Jack Johnson”—played first base for the Philadelphia Giants in 1903 and 1904. This is apparently the source for Johnson’s entry in Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 436), where Riley takes Rube’s claim at face value.  Needless to say, Johnson was not the Giants’ first baseman, then or ever. He was a friend of Foster, however, and there were some other baseball connections for Jack Johnson, which I might write about some other time.

•Rube declares that “In all the years I pitched I lost only SIX games to colored teams.” He had a great winning percentage, but not that great: 48-17 against black professional teams in the U.S., and 19-13 against Cuban teams in Cuba. Again, he probably wasn’t counting the Cubans. (I haven’t tried to separate out his wins over Cuban Stars teams in the U.S. from his overall “Negro league” record—maybe if you don’t count Cuban teams at all, anywhere, his claim holds up…)

There are also a couple of nuggets of information here that haven’t been much remarked on, but that are also pretty interesting.

•He says that when John Henry Lloyd joined the Lelands he was an outfielder until the shortstop (George Wright was the 1909 Lelands’ shortstop) fell ill in Jacksonville, presumably during spring training. “Lloyd was brought in to fill the position and our shortstop lost his job forever.” Of course Lloyd had already been a middle infielder for several years with the Cuban X-Giants and Philadelphia Giants. It’s hard to believe he wasn’t signed to play shortstop for the Lelands. Yet Rube seems to be saying here that he meant to convert Lloyd into an outfielder until fate intervened.

•And of course there’s the original reason I became interested in this interview. Talking about the Philadelphia Giants, he remarks that “Georgia Rabbit” Washington joined the team. This provides solid confirmation of my circumstantial case that George Washington (and not Walter Ball) was the “Georgia Rabbit” that Sol White was referring to in his book. To underline this point, earlier in the column, when Rube refers to Walter Ball coming to Chicago to play for the “Union Giants” in 1906 (Foster, or Wilson, means the Leland Giants) he calls him “Thomas Walter Ball,” and not George Washington Ball. (Official documents call him “Walter Thomas Ball.”)

outsider baseball

Odds are, any regular reader of this blog has already done this, but if you haven’t, you should immediately drop everything and make arrangements to obtain a copy of Outsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876-1950, by Scott Simkus. Get it for your e-reader, or order it through your favorite online retailer, or (the best option) go to a bookstore and buy it off the shelf.

Clearly, as co-founder with Scott of the (late, lamented) Outsider Baseball Bulletin, I’m biased here. But who cares: this is baseball history written for the twenty-first century.

The phrase (and the book of course) is wholly Scott’s, but I think it’s fair to say that we developed the idea of “outsider baseball” together. It’s based on a simple set of observations. First: baseball was segregated until 1947 (and in truth it was still de facto segregated for a number of years after this). Most players of color were excluded from the major leagues. Second: the farther back you go in history, the freer the minor leagues were from interference by the majors. In other words, talent was less and less concentrated, and the better the minors were in relation to the majors. Third: before television and other mass entertainments and media took hold, a market niche existed for semiprofessional (or in some cases, fully professional) baseball at a local level—the city leagues, town teams, industrial leagues, and barnstorming curiosities like the House of David. Some of these teams were very good, as good as the top minor leagues, and featured many future or former major leaguers.

Put it all together, and you have a baseball world, prior to 1950, in which the major leagues contained much, much less of the available talent than they do now. If you buy Scott’s analysis, at various points before 1950 there was enough star power outside the National and American leagues to fully staff a third major league.

This is the backdrop, the theoretical basis, of Outsider Baseball. So how does Scott follow through? With an entertaining mix of storytelling, serious research, and some (fairly light) sabermetric analysis, a lot of it based on his vast collection of box scores involving outsider baseball teams. It’s a fun read, an introduction to the world outside the majors for the kind of people who read Bill James and Rob Neyer.

Scott looks at the truth behind legends. Did Cool Papa Bell really run the bases in 12 seconds flat? How many home runs did Josh Gibson really hit in his career? How good were those bearded House of David teams anyway? Could the Pittsburgh Crawfords have competed in the National League of the 1930s? Unless I missed it, there aren’t any impassioned arguments to put anybody in the Hall of Fame—but you’re introduced to plenty of people you’ve probably never heard of, and who are worth knowing about, people like Jimmy Clinton, Buck Lai, Eddie Gerner.  

The book also digs up historical curiosities like the old “Field Day” events in which players competed in distance-throwing, base-running, and other track and field contests, and calculates how fast pre-radar gun pitchers might have been, based on how far they could throw.

It’s an engrossing treasure house of a book, one of those rare books you read and then think, “Well, that was too short.” It doesn’t exhaust its (many) subjects, not by a long shot. But if you want to know the direction in which baseball research is headed (at least the kind I do), there isn’t a better guide.

a grave marker for sol white

I was interviewed by Ryan Whirty for an article in the Staten Island Advance on the upcoming placement of a marker on the grave of Sol White in Frederick Douglass Memorial Park. It will happen on May 10, thanks to Jeremy Krock and the Negro League Grave Marker Project as well as the Friends of Frederick Douglass Memorial Park.

Ryan, by the way, is looking into White’s final years, his commitment to the Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island and his death there in 1955 (and also the 1948 death of Cannonball Dick Redding at the nearby Pilgrim State Hospital).