Agate Type

overestimating the fog: bullet rogan and joe williams

Joe Posnanski has a great series (currently on hiatus) listing his version of the 100  greatest players in baseball history, a list that (as you might expect) includes several Negro leaguers. I’ve enjoyed these pieces quite a bit. But I wanted to respond to a few statements Pos makes (in passing) in a couple of the Negro league entries—not to be a jerk (or at least I hope it doesn’t come off like that), but to emphasize a few things about the Negro leagues that I think aren’t too well-known, even to initiates.

In his entry on Bullet Rogan, Posnanski writes that Rogan “played the bulk of his professional career in the 1920s, before there was even moderate coverage of the Negro Leagues…”

You hear this, or something like it, a lot. I guess the assumption is that everything improves through time, that the farther back in history you go the worse the records are, that the Negro leagues got better and better known through the years, and that the era of Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard and Monte Irvin in the 1940s must be the best-documented part of black baseball history.

In fact, though, the 1920s were, by far, the most intensively covered era in Negro league history. True, nearly all the substantive writing about them was published in the black press. But there was quite a bit of it, at least compared to other eras, with several nationally-distributed newspapers (the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American) along with a number of more regional or local papers (New York Age, Kansas City Call, Philadelphia Tribune, etc.) devoting multiple pages per weekly issue to sports, which during the summer basically meant professional baseball. There were a number of columnists who dealt solely or mostly with black baseball. The Defender and Courier both tried to act as news clearing houses, so to speak, for the Negro leagues, printing coverage and box scores for both the major black leagues and the major independent clubs.

And beyond the black press, the mainstream (white) daily papers in most league cities regularly published box scores for Negro league games—which leads me to this passage, a little later in the Rogan essay: after quoting some of Rogan’s season statistics from Shades of Glory, Posnanski remarks, “But the numbers are foggy. Everything from the Negro Leagues in that time, sadly, is foggy.”

On the contrary: the 1920s is also the best-documented decade of pre-integration black baseball history in terms of box scores and statistics derived from them, by a long shot. For example: we have box scores for 78 out of 79 Monarchs games against NNL opponents in 1920; 100 out of 101 in 1921; 84 out of 85 in 1922; 98 out of 98 in 1923; 85 out of 89 in 1924 (including the World Series); and 76 out of 80 in 1928. That’s a total of 521 out of 532 games in those six seasons, or 98 percent. The numbers we’ve got for Rogan in those years are pretty good, quality-wise. And there is every reason to believe that the remaining seasons from the 1920s—1925-27, 1929—are quite similar, as far as coverage goes.

Moreover, the box scores from the 1920s are, generally speaking, more carefully compiled and complete than the box scores of any other decade.

So, at least in terms of NNL games, the numbers from the 1920s are anything but “foggy.” Compared to the major leagues, yes, they are a little fuzzy, but only a little. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the amount of coverage in the black press started to slip, and that both daily and black weekly papers started cutting down on the number of Negro league box scores they printed.

In the entry on Joe Williams, Posnanski writes that “Smokey Joe Williams or Cyclone Joe Williams — he was called both — was born at some point between 1874 and 1885, the exactly year remains hopelessly lost.”

In fact, Williams was born on April 6 in either 1885, 1886, or 1887, in or near Seguin, Texas. Both his World War I and World War II draft cards (signed by Williams) have April 6, 1886. Williams’s entry in the 1900 U.S. census says April 1886. According to John Holway, Williams’s marriage license says April 6, 1885, though later on the same page he says it reads April 6, 1886. He also reports that Williams’s death certificate puts his birth date as April 6, 1887. We don’t have a certain birth record (and it wouldn’t be surprising if one was not made), but all evidence points to a birth date between 1885 and 1887.

Posnanski continues, writing of Williams’s career, that “[t]here is no earned run average to judge — nobody was keeping track of errors — so run average is used.”

Actually, everybody was keeping track of errors during the career of Joe Williams. Nearly every baseball box score printed in those days included errors. They did not keep track of earned runs, at least not for Negro league games—though these can be figured using game accounts, or estimated using errors and passed balls recorded in box scores.

And finally, from the nitpicking files: Posnanski writes that “…stories of the way [Williams] would unwind that body and unleash his fastball still spark the imagination. People would say it was like facing a Cyclone — which is how Williams got his second nickname, Cyclone Joe Williams.”

Okay, okay, this is just a hobby horse of mine. But I can’t resist. “Cyclone” was Wiliams’s first and primary nickname. “Smokey Joe” didn’t appear until the late 1910s, and didn’t become prevalent until the mid-1920s, when Williams moved to the Homestead Grays, and the Pittsburgh Courier undertook a concerted PR campaign to associate him with Pittsburgh, the “Smoky City.”

Anyway, none of this is to detract from Posnanski’s writing. I just wanted to make the point that even some of the most sympathetic and best-informed accounts of the Negro leagues sometimes traffic in exaggerated notions of the fogginess and unknowability of black baseball history, despite the availability of meticulous and well-documented research. We can do better than that.

NOTE: For those who don’t recognize it, the title of this post is a reference to this article by Bill James.

clarence orme

Stefanie Caruthers writes that her great-uncle, Clarence Orme (above), played baseball for the Kansas City Giants in the 1930s. Born on April 3, 1899, in Chamois, Missouri, Clarence Charles Orme moved to Kansas City, Kansas, in 1917, and lived in the area for the rest of his life, working much of the time as a butcher in meatpacking plants. He was a “lanky,” 6’6” infielder, nicknamed “Clarence Longshot,” and when he played baseball, Stefanie says, he was sometimes paid with live chickens.

Here’s an article from 1933 about his play with the Kansas City Giants:

(Kansas City Plaindealer, July 14, 1933, p. 5)

He passed away in 1968, and until now knowledge of his baseball career seems to have survived only in his family. A lot has been lost. We don’t know exactly how long or how much he played, or all the teams he played for, although presumably most or all of them were in the Kansas City area. But we can identify a few possible traces of Clarence Orme’s life in baseball.

For example, it could be that, much earlier in his life, he played for the Kansas City Monarchs.

During a three-game series with the Cuban Stars in June, 1920, the Monarchs, in just their second month of league play ever, were still juggling their lineup and trying out (and discarding) players left and right. Edgar Washington was still playing first base for them, and Bullet Rogan and Dobie Moore were yet to join the team. With their regular third baseman, Carroll Mothell, injured, on June 6 the Monarchs brought in a guy named “Armes” to hold down the hot corner against José Leblanc and the Cubans.

Leblanc struck out eight with his spitter, Armes went hitless and committed three errors, and the Cubans came out on top, 5 to 3.

(Kansas City Times, June 7, 1920)

The next day “Armes” switched positions with one of the team’s stars, George Carr, the new guy going to second and Carr taking over third. Armes still couldn't get a hit, and he was replaced in the middle of the game by a pitcher, Zack Foreman, but he managed to avoid any damaging bobbles in the field. he The Monarchs still fell short, 6 to 2.

Although it’s still “Armes” in the box score, in the game story we get a reference to “Ornes, a local player, being sent to second.”

(Kansas City Journal, June 8, 1920)

After a rainout on June 8, the two clubs managed to play off the third game on June 9. Ornes (as he appears now in the box score) got a third chance, still failing to get a hit, but (as analysis of the box score shows) drawing two walks and scoring a run. The Monarchs pounded the Cubans 11 to 5.

(Kansas City Times, June 10, 1920)

Researching the 1920 Negro National League years ago, at first I thought this was the Cuban infielder Joaquín Arumí (who also appears in some Cuban sources as Arumís). But Arumí doesn’t appear for the Monarchs until July, and besides there’s the remark in the KC Journal that “Ornes” was a “local player.” In the Seamheads DB, he currently appears as Ornes (no first name).

Stefanie thinks that “Ornes”/”Armes” is definitely her uncle, and I agree that Clarence Orme is certainly the best candidate we’ve got.

Also: there was a player named “Clarence Ora” with the Cleveland Cubs in 1932, about whom nothing is known. Since Clarence Orme was still active the following season in Kansas City, he would seem to be a possibility here as well.

antonio susini

During the 1921/22 Cuban winter season, the Cuban League could only field two teams, and when Almendares totally dominated, winning 4 out of the first 5 games played, fan interest plummeted. The league called it quits even before the New Year. Deprived of their expected income, most of the players were hired by the Central and Cuba clubs of Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern end of the island. The two teams promptly arranged their own lengthy series, the Campeonato de Oriente, or Championship of Oriente province.

On January 30, 1922, in the eighth inning of one of the games, a controversy erupted over a close play at home. Players from both teams argued with the umpires and with each other.  It went on and on. The crowd grew restless, and the argument more heated. José Leblanc, a pitcher for Cuba playing right field in this game, squared off against Antonio Susini, Central’s shortstop. They exchanged harsh words. Suddenly Susini lost it. With the bat he held in his hands, he struck a brutal blow to Leblanc’s head and knocked him senseless to the ground.

The crowd poured onto the field, and only the intervention of the police already on hand kept more violence from breaking out. Leblanc was taken to a nearby hospital where doctors drilled holes in his skull to relieve the pressure from swelling. In the meantime, the police handcuffed Susini and took him away.

Leblanc had suffered a serious fracture in his left frontal parietal region. That night doctors operated on him, extracting several pieces of bone from his brain with tweezers. He never regained consciousness, and died the following afternoon.*

News of the event spread through Cuba and beyond. A brief Associated Press item was reprinted in many U.S. newspapers, such as the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

(Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 31, 1922)

Susini was charged with murder. According to secondary sources, he was convicted, and sentenced to a term that I’ve seen described as either 13 years in prison, or 10 to 15 years. And, until now, that’s pretty much where he exited baseball history. He killed another player on a baseball field. Surely nobody would want him back in the game.

As it turns out, despite much deserved condemnation for his horrific act, there was a lot of sympathy for Susini. By 1924 a group of fans had banded together to ask for a presidential pardon for Susini. I haven’t been able to find much more on that effort, or whether it was successful or not. I tend to think, though, that Susini served out his full sentence—because he next enters the historical record 14 years after he murdered Leblanc. Amazingly, it appears that he did indeed return to play professional baseball again.

Prior to the Leblanc incident, Antonio Susini had played in the United States once, in 1921 with Abel Linares’s All Cubans. Along with the other All Cubans players, Susini appears on a passenger list aboard the steam packet Governor Cobb, which departed Havana for New York on April 21, 1921:

Susini is listed here as 19, which is crossed out and replaced with 20.

Fast-forward 15 years. Here’s a passenger list showing players for the eastern Cuban Stars (a different team from Pompez’s New York Cubans, by the way), traveling from Havana to New York aboard the SS Florida on May 14, 1936. On line 11 is one Antonio Susini, now aged 35:

 

Here’s the continuation of Susini’s entry from the second page of the passenger list, which shows his sister “H. Susini” as his contact, and says he was last in the United States in New York in 1921.

Here’s a box score showing “Suseni” appearing as a pinch-hitter for the Cuban Stars against the Black Yankees at Dexter Park on May 30, 1936:

(Long Island Daily Press, May 31, 1936, p. 17)

Moreover: in 1937 and 1938 a first baseman named Antonio Susini hit .297 and slugged .411 in 50 games for the Santa Rosa club of the Mexican League.

It would appear that, after serving a prison sentence for murdering a fellow player on the field, Antonio Susini was able to come back and play professional baseball for a few years in his mid- to late thirties.

From this distance, it’s impossible to say why. That the crime was certainly not premeditated, and was probably the result of a moment of madness, likely played a role. Susini, though not yet an established star, might have been popular with fans and/or players.

For what it’s worth, José María Fernández, the veteran catcher and player-manager, the man who (as I pointed out in my last post) said in 1927 that witnessing Susini’s murder of Leblanc was the “greatest displeasure” in his baseball career, was Susini’s teammate on the 1936 Cuban Stars (as he had been on the 1922 Central club, as well as the 1921 All Cubans). He witnessed Susini’s crime, and yet he was able to play on the same team with him again, albeit 15 years later.

There’s a single photo out there that purports to show Antonio Susini (I don’t know the original source.)

Though some doubt has been cast on this player’s identity as Susini, that doubt is rooted in the fact that this photo shows a Cuban Stars uniform from the late 1920s or 1930s, whereas Susini was only known to have appeared in the U.S. in 1921, and then for the All Cubans.

In fact, Susini played for the 1936 Cuban Stars. And the uniform shown above is identical to the one shown in this photograph of none other than José María Fernández.

* - My account of Leblanc’s murder is drawn from two January 31, 1922, articles from the Santiago newspapers El Cubano Libre and La Independencia, reprinted in El Mundo, February 3, 1922, and from a January 31 article in Diario de la Marina.

UPDATE 7:08 pm I should add that according to newspaper accounts of his death, Leblanc’s full name was José Leblanc Vargas, he was born in Cienfuegos, and he was 28 years old. These details do not match anybody I have found in passenger lists yet.

UPDATE 9/9/2014 According to this article, the longtime Cuban player Cheo Ramos, a teammate of Susini on the 1921 All Cubans, claimed that Susini was a rumba dancer (of the fast-paced “Columbia” style) and an “Ekobio Abakuá” or “Ñañigo,” a member of the Abakuá secret society, an Afro-Cuban fraternal organization.

Also, Mark Aubrey tracked down an exchange between a couple of old Cuban baseball fans in the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald in 1982, in which one of them remembers that Susini served his sentence on the Isla de Pinos (the Isle of Pines; now called the Isla de Juventud). There he played prison baseball, and occasionally took the field against teams that visited from Havana—which might account for how Antonio Susini remained in the consciousness of the Cuban baseball community.

josé leblanc, mystery pitcher of the cuban stars

On the morning of Friday, May 23, 1919, Tinti Molina brought his Cuban Stars across the Mexican/U.S. border at Laredo, Texas. His team announced their presence in the United States that afternoon with a 22 to 2 walloping of the local club at Caliche Park. The Cuban pitcher, one “LeBlanc,” twirled “a fine game.”  Meanwhile in St. Louis fans were looking forward to the Cubans’ arrival for a three-game series in the brand-new Giants Park starting on Sunday, May 25. The Cubans, as you can see in their border-crossing records, gave St. Louis as their destination in the U.S. But Giants rooters were disappointed to hear that Molina’s team “had been held up by emigration authorities and could not reach St. Louis in time for the big series” (St. Louis Argus, May 30, 1919). Evidently, the “emigration authorities” were forcing the Cubans to play a further three games in Laredo on Saturday and Sunday.

(Laredo Times, May 25, 1919, p. 11)

Charlie Mills, the Giants’ business manager, either bought the excuse, or didn’t care. He released the Cubans from their obligations, and the Cuban Stars passed through St. Louis on Tuesday, May 27, on their way to Chicago, where they were scheduled to meet the American Giants on Friday.

With them would go the guy we’re really interested in here, the pitcher Leblanc. He had been a journeyman catcher in Cuba before pitching a half-dozen games for Molina’s team in the Cuban league during the 1918/19 season. The 1919 North American season would be something of a breakthrough for him, as he would establish himself as the Cuban Stars’ ace.

There are two interesting points about Leblanc. First, his greatest successes as a ballplayer were really in the United States. His Cuban League record over three seasons as pitcher amounted to a meager 4-7. But in the U.S., he would go 32-24 against top black competition for a team that went 89-93 overall. For two of those years, 1919 and 1920, the Cubans were exclusively a road club; Leblanc’s 17-12 in those seasons was his road record. By 1921, Leblanc was one of the top pitchers in the Negro National League.

The other thing about Leblanc is that we know very little about him. We know his primary pitch was a spitball, and we know that he probably threw right-handed. Other than that….virtually nothing. I haven’t been able to find a team photo of the western Cuban Stars in 1919-1921, and I am reasonably certain I’ve never seen a photo of Leblanc. We don’t even really know what his name was. He appears as “Julio LeBlanc” in reference books, but I’ve so far seen him called only “José Leblanc” (with a small “b”) in Cuban sources (which is the usage I’ve adopted in the Seamheads DB).*  Passenger lists or border-crossing records are not a help in his case. I’ve located the Cuban Stars teams traveling to the U.S. in each of Leblanc’s three seasons—but nobody named anything like Leblanc accompanied them, nor can I find any reasonable candidates traveling at different times or on different ships.

Twelve players are known to have appeared for the Cuban Stars in 1919. There are border-crossing records for ten of them (along with manager Molina)—everyone except Leblanc, and the young catcher Eufemio Abreu.

But Latin names, which include both the father’s and mother’s surname, can be complicated. For example, “Jose I. Casanova” (at the top right) is actually the pitcher known as José Junco—Junco was his father’s name, Casanova his mother’s. Similarly, “Francisco Toledo” here is the player known as “Tatica” Campos. It’s quite possible for a Cuban player to be known by one name, but appear in some official records with both a different surname and a different given name.

And it turns out that there were two more men who traveled with the Cuban Stars to the United States in 1919, 1920, and 1921,  all three of the seasons Leblanc was with the team. Their names were Manuel Barros and Isidro Valdés, and neither is a name known from a baseball context.

Since both Barros and Valdés (how the name is spelled in the 1920 and 1921 passenger lists) crossed the border with the Cuban Stars at Laredo on May 23, and since we know Leblanc pitched for the Cuban Stars later that same day, it seems virtually certain that “Leblanc” is really one of these men. And the other could well be Abreu (who also played for the Cubans for those three seasons, before first appearing on a 1923 passenger list under the name Eufemio Abreu). But which is which…there’s no way to tell yet.

Playing in an independent league in Santiago de Cuba in February, 1922, Leblanc was hit on the head with a bat by the infielder Antonio Susini during a game. His skull was fractured. He lingered in a coma for a few days before dying, leaving only slippery traces in fading box scores.

*-The only mildly famous “Julio LeBlanc” I’ve found in Cuban history was a notorious member of the secret police during the Gerardo Machado regime. This LeBlanc also came to a violent end, beaten and kicked to death by a mob during the uprising that ended Machado’s rule in 1933.

(NOTE: This piece was originally published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin on September 22, 2010.)

UPDATE 9/6/2014 Since this article is nearly four years old, I should add a couple more notes about his name that I’ve come up with since then. In 1927 the catcher José María Fernández remarked in an interview published in Diario de la Marina that his “greatest disgust” in baseball was “the day that the player Susini killed the pitcher ‘Cheo’ Leblanc, in Santiago de Cuba, with a blow to the head.” “Cheo” is a nickname for José. But I’ve also run across a few references to Leblanc as “Jules” (not Julio) while he was still alive, most notably in Diario de la Marina on December 12, 1921, where he’s called “Monseñor Jules Leblanc” and said to have “manos ducales” (a duke’s hands) and a “pose aristocrática” (an aristocratic pose).  He was also sometimes called “Count” Leblanc.

UPDATE 9/7/2014 See here for an account of Leblanc’s murder and to find out what happened to his killer.