In June 1919, the San Antonio Black Aces of the Texas Negro League raided the Waco Black Navigators for six players, the core of their team: “the famous ‘Highpockets’, who goes by the name of Hudspeth,” along with “Catcher Mackey, Second Baseman Washington and Blackman, third baseman,” as well as a “hard-hitting outfielder from Waco” named Johnny Jones, and “W. Davis, southpaw pitcher” (San Antonio Express, June 8, 1919, p. 30).
The 6’4” Hudspeth was probably the most celebrated of the new San Antonio Black Aces, and no doubt Mackey and Blackmon were good, too; but Walter Davis, who quickly established himself as the team’s best pitcher, may have had the most impact on the Texas Negro League pennant race. His tireless mound work earned him the nickname “Steel Arm.” The San Antonio Evening News pronounced him “a real whiz when it comes to slipping in the deceivers. He has a curve that looks like it was moulded in a roundhouse and he makes opposing batters swing like a Dutch mill in their effort to connect with his delivery” (September 12, 1919).
But in the final game of the season against the Dallas Black Marines, with the championship on the line, it was Davis’s bat that would make the difference. Steel had been knocked off the mound in the first inning, and moved to center field while catcher Biz Mackey came in to pitch. With the score tied 5-all in the bottom of the eighth, and two men on base, Davis came to bat. “There were to balls and two strikes on him,” the Evening News recounted. “He wanted to hit so bad he could taste it. Crouching like a pup scratching a pot, and wiping the perspiration from his awning, he took a bead on one of [William] Ross’s groovers. Whowee! And the ball landed in center field.” It was “a snorting two-bagger.” Both runners scored, and the Black Aces led 7 to 5. Mackey took care of the Dallas batters in the top of the ninth, and the Aces were champions.
(Side note: these “minor league” black teams were packed with talent. Dallas could count William Ross, Connie Rector, Bob Bailey, John Hamilton, O’Neal Pullen, and Robert Sloan among their future Negro leaguers, while San Antonio, in addition to the players already mentioned, had Crush Holloway, Bob McClure, and Morris Williams.)
In spring of 1920, the Black Aces’ key players had returned signed contracts for the upcoming season—with the exception of Steel Arm Davis. Then on June 14, it was revealed that the Dayton Marcos of the Negro National League had signed two new players: a catcher named Jefferson, and a pitcher named “Lefty Davis,” who had been playing for a Charleston, W. Va., club (Dayton Journal, June 14, 1920).
The name of the Charleston, W. Va., team wasn’t given by the Dayton Journal, but I was able to find a note in the Charleston Daily Mail (March 23) about a “colored baseball team” being formed in Charleston (interestingly, the manager’s name was Jefferson).
Anyway, “Lefty Davis” appeared once in an NNL game for the Marcos, against Joe Green’s Chicago Giants in Dayton on June 14. He started but only lasted two innings.
Less than two weeks later, “Davis” appeared as a pinch-hitter for none other than the Chicago Giants in Kansas City. He got into two more games in the same series, both times as a relief pitcher, then seems to have left the team shortly thereafter. But not before making it into a team photograph of the Chicago Giants:
According to Phil Dixon, the second player standing on the right is “James Davis.” Here’s a detail of him, compared to three photos from Phil’s book of Walter “Steel Arm” Davis:
Several years ago I was absolutely sure that James Davis was Steel Arm Davis. But seeing the photos of James (on the left) juxtaposed with the Steel Arm photos (the other three), I’m not so sure anymore.
Other than Lefty Davis of Charleston and Dayton, and James Davis of the Chicago Giants, I don’t have any other clues to Steel Arm Davis’s whereabouts in 1920. But in 1921, Steel Arm Davis pitched and played outfield for the Galveston Black Sandcrabs of the Texas Negro League, usually batting in the middle of the order. On August 25, 1921, the Indianapolis Star reported that C. I. Taylor had “wired transportation yesterday for ‘Steel Arm’ Davis, a big southpaw from Texas…” But Davis never showed up in Indianapolis, remaining with Galveston for the rest of the season.
For the 1922 season Steel Arm moved to the Texas Negro League champion Dallas Black Giants, again splitting his time between the outfield and the mound. They repeated as pennant-winners, but lost the Dixie Series to the Negro Southern League champions, the Memphis Red Sox, led by Turkey Stearnes.
Like Stearnes, Davis finally moved up to the Negro National League in 1923. He was by reputation “the best lefthander in the South,” but with the Detroit Stars that season he was only a mediocre pitcher (5-4, 4.75). He hit very well (.338/.391/.500) as a part-time outfielder in Mack Park, built for lefthanded hitters.
The following year he abandoned organized black baseball, joining Gilkerson’s Union Giants, a barnstorming team that was probably for much of the 1920s comparable to the Homestead Grays in quality of play. It was claimed that he was “the highest salaried colored ball player in the game” (Wisconsin State Journal, May 31, 1924, p. 9). The Chicago American Giants picked him up for a month in July and August, and again he hit well (.329/.398/.506) in 22 games, before returning to the Union Giants to finish out the season.
For the next two years he stayed with the Union Giants. Unlike their fellow independents the Homestead Grays, the Unions used clowning as part of their appeal, and Davis was apparently an expert practitioner of the art. This passage from a 1927 article about the Union Giants gives a sense of the retrograde, minstrelish atmosphere in which the team barnstormed:
(Davenport, Iowa, Democrat and Leader, May 5, 1927, p. 7)
As it happens, Davenport’s bugs would be disappointed in the spring of 1927, as that season Davis returned to the NNL and Chicago. According to Baseball-Reference.com he hit .417 and slugged .591 that first year back in the NNL (with the unlikely total of one walk), and followed up with three more solid seasons as an outfielder, batting .322, .302, and .329 in a home park that could cut scoring by as much as 50 percent. It’s possible that the best hitters on the American Giants during these years (Davis and Pythias Russ) were as good as the best hitters on the St. Louis Stars (Willie Wells, Mule Suttles), who played in the home run haven of Stars Park. (At least they were a lot closer than their raw stats would suggest.)
In 1931, with the NNL on the verge of collapse, Davis returned to the barnstorming life with Gilkerson’s Union Giants, where he was hyped as “the Colored Babe Ruth” (Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 29, 1931, p. 2). His teammates included the Negro league veterans Cristóbal Torriente, Jimmie Lyons, Hurley McNair, Dink Mothell, and Owen Smaulding, along with up-and-comers Alex Radcliff and Subby Byas. In mid-July Davis was said to be leading the team with a .464 average; by the end of that month he was credited with a total of 46 home runs. In September he was voted “best infielder” in the Southwest Iowa Semipro Tournament (Luis Tiant, Sr., of the tournament-winning Cuban Stars, was named best pitcher).
When the American Giants joined the Negro Southern League in 1932, Davis was back in their outfield, still hitting well (.305/.369/.509), and he stayed with the team when they became charter members of the second Negro National League in 1933. He was traded to the Nashville Elite Giants in 1934, but jumped the team and, along with a number of other Negro leaguers, signed to play independent (and racially integrated) ball in North Dakota.
He hit .250 in 27 NNL games for the American Giants in 1935. After this, his career started to wind down a bit. He spent 1938 back in Texas as player-manager of the San Antonio Black Missions. In 1939 PCL veteran and Pirates rookie Fern Bell told Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier called Steel Arm Davis, whom he had played against on the west coast, “a great outfielder and a hell of a sweet thrower.” He counted Davis among the many Negro leaguers he thought could be stars in the major leagues (“Are Negro Ball Players Good Enough to ‘Crash’ the Majors?” Pittsburgh Courier, September 2, 1939, p. 16).
As late as 1941 Davis was still a feared power hitter for the Palmer House All-Stars in Chicago. But on November 30, 1941, he was shot and killed in a tavern in Chicago. He was remembered for a few years, particularly in Wisconsin, where he had played for a semipro team. Dan Burley once named him the “hardest throwing outfielder” he had seen (New York Amsterdam News, May 15, 1948, p. 14). Still, his memory faded rather quickly; he had spent too much of his career outside the black big leagues.
Back when I was originally doing research in World War I draft registration cards, I’d found a Walter Davis living in Waco in June 1918, born June 22, 1896, in Wortham, Texas.
But according to Steel Arm Davis’s state death record, he was born in 1903 in “Richard, Kentucky.” Since there is no Richard, Kentucky, as far as I can tell (possibly a mistake for Richmond, Kentucky), and a 1903 birthdate would have made him 16 years old when he pitched for the Black Aces in 1919, the information seems a little suspect. To top it off, newspaper accounts of his death said he was 50 years old (thus born in 1891).
Recently, however, I ran across Walter Davis on a passenger list for the SS Northland leaving Havana for the U.S. on January 20, 1928—the day after Steel Arm Davis’s last appearance in the 1927/28 Cuban winter league. Though it gives San Antonio as his birthplace, the birthdate matches the draft card for Walter Davis of Waco in 1918.
Moreover, check out this ad from 1918 for Davis’s first known team, the Waco Black Navigators, published on June 2, 1918, just three days before Davis registered for the draft in Waco.
(Waco News-Tribune, June 2, 1918, p. 8)
His draft card did not give his actual occupation, but it did list his employer as none other than Charles Tusa—the owner of the Waco Black Navigators.
This means that Davis only really got started in the major Negro leagues at the age of 27 (1923), and most of his career took place in his thirties (1927 to 1935). What statistics we have, then, are mostly for his decline phase, and, as I noted above, reflect a very poor hitting environment. This whole post is, I suppose, a roundabout way of saying I think Steel Arm Davis was a really good player who has been almost completely overlooked in the history of black baseball.
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