(Chicago Defender, May 29, 1926, p. 10)
The above shows the 1926 Cleveland Elites and their bus. Aside from its interest as a photograph of a quite obscure team, it is also one of the earlier images I have seen of a Negro league team bus.
The Elites unfortunately did not amount to much—the owner Sam Shepard, a former St. Louis Stars owner, hired Candy Jim Taylor, former Stars manager, to run the new team, but Taylor couldn’t replicate his success in St. Louis. He used at least 37 players trying to come up with a winning formula, but wound up quitting and going to Detroit before the season was done. Cleveland finished 8-40-1 in league competition. (Amazingly that was not the worst record in the league—the Dayton Marcos finished 6-36 to beat out their fellow Ohioans for last-place honors in the very lopsided 1926 NNL.)
Although on the diamond the Elites were way behind the league, on the roads and highways they were leading the pack. As the caption indicates, the multi-talented Shepard designed the Elites’ bus himself, as well as that of the champion Kansas City Monarchs. (Incidentally, while there are many photos of Monarchs buses from the 1930s and later, I don’t think I’ve seen one from the 1920s.)
The 1920s were the decade when Negro league teams switched from trains to buses. This gave them vastly more flexibility. It was once common for games to be curtailed or the second games of doubleheaders cancelled so one or both teams could catch a train. If they could jump on their own bus right after the game teams could stay an extra few hours if necessary—or at least that was the idea. With more control over the travel schedule, team owners found it easier to book more and more games—and the season became even more hectic and exhausting for the players.
UPDATE 11/2/2020 Here is an item from a week earlier about Sam Shepard and the Elites team bus:
(Chicago Defender, May 22, 1926, p. 10)
Also, with respect to the discussion in the comments about the size of the Elites roster: there were roster limits in the NNL. Teams were usually expected to keep no more than 16 players, though this varied a bit, and enforcement of the rule was not always strict. Sometimes teams were content with less—for example, the Cuban Stars used only 13 players over their whole 1926 NNL schedule.
The Elites definitely kept around a large number of players, and Candy Jim Taylor made use of them, with lots of relief pitching, in-game substitutions, pinch-hitters, and pinch-runners. It seemed to be a mixture of cycling through a high volume of players in the hopes of finding some talent while desperately seeking for any possible advantage within a given game.
Here’s a box score for a game played on May 31, a few days after the bus photo was published, showing the Elites using 17 players, including Taylor and Frank Duncan, the veteran player-coach who briefly took over as manager later in the year.
(St. Louis Argus, June 4, 1926, p. 7)
For whatever reason, nothing worked at all—the Elites were trounced in this game 11 to 1, finished with 8 wins and 40 losses in league competition, and folded before the season was over. Taylor finished the year with Detroit, then returned to St. Louis in 1927, eventually leading the Stars to a pennant in 1928.
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