Agate Type

bill cadreau, 1911 union giants

Back in 2012 I published an article in Black Ball (Volume 5, Number 2 / Fall 2012)* about a Chippewa Indian named Bill Cadreau who pitched one game for the Chicago White Sox at the end of the 1910 season (under the name “Chief Chouneau”), then appeared for the Chicago Union Giants seven years later, in 1917. This made him, as far as I know, the only non-Cuban ballplayer between Fleet Walker and Jackie Robinson to play for both a major league team and an avowedly all-black professional club. (In this post I checked out, but could not substantiate, the claim that Walter Johnson, of all people, also bridged this gap.)

Anyway, one consequence of the investigation into Brian Campf’s panoramic photograph of the 1911 Chicago Union Giants is that I found this item:

(Escanaba Morning Press, February 11, 1912, p. 12)

So Bill Cadreau actually pitched for the Union Giants much earlier than 1917, in fact just the year after his cup of coffee in the majors. In my original research I had found a game where he pitched against the Union Giants in 1911, but did not realize he had pitched for them that year. As it turns out, he was with the team within a week of Brian’s photo being taken. Here’s the box score for one of his games with the Unions, played in Escanaba, Michigan, on August 29:

(Escanaba Morning Press, August 30, 1911, pp. 1, 8)

*--The article in Black Ball was itself based on an earlier article I wrote for the Outsider Baseball Bulletin in 2010.

bill cadreau

I’ve got a new article out in the latest issue of Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, about Bill Cadreau, who pitched for the both the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Union Giants.  This is a revised version of a piece I published back in 2010 in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin. Here’s the abstract:

In 1910 William Cadreau, a young pitcher from the semiprofessional circuit of the upper Midwest, made his sole appearance with the Chicago White Sox. Seven years later, after a checkered career in the minor leagues, Cadreau spent a few weeks with the Chicago Union Giants, a traveling African American team. In doing so, Cadreau became one of the few ballplayers known to have played for both a white major league team and an avowedly all-black professional team between Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1884 and Jackie Robinson in 1947. While a number of Cubans made the same journey, starting with Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans in 1910, Cadreau is so far the only American known to have done so. Although Native Americans did not routinely play for all-black teams, it was likely Cadreau's identity as an Ojibwe Indian that made it possible for him to cross the color line.

I wouldn’t be especially surprised if somebody came up with another American player who made the journey between the major leagues and the Negro leagues during the Jim Crow era.  For a while I thought it was possible that Walter Johnson, of all people, accomplished the feat, but I wasn’t able to substantiate it.