Agate Type

john taylor

There were no fewer than three Negro league pitchers of (some) consequence named John Taylor—Steel Arm Johnny Taylor , John “Red” Taylor, and Schoolboy Johnny Taylor.  Probably the least known of these three, Red Taylor pitched for the Chicago Giants and New York Lincoln Giants in the 1920s. (The baseball-reference.com Negro leagues site has wrongly attributed his pitching for the Chicago Giants in 1920 and 1921 to Steel Arm Taylor.)

Taylor was a right-handed pitcher who used an emery ball, which, as Ben Taylor remarked sardonically in 1925, “has been declared illegal in all leagues except the Eastern [Colored] League” (Baltimore Afro-American, January 17, 1925, p. A7).  According to the Chicago Defender (April 24, 1920), Taylor had “created quite a stir down East, where he was a member of the same club from which Tom Williams was secured; he is an overseas hero, is of fine physique, has a world of smoke on his offerings and knows the game.”

While Tom Williams seems to have appeared professionally for the Bacharach Giants in 1916 then for the American Giants in 1917, in 1918 and 1919 he went east to pitch for the Hilldale Club (as well as the Royal Giants and Bacharachs again) before returning to Chicago in 1920.  It so happens that in 1917 Hilldale featured a pitcher named John Taylor.  The following photograph of the 1917 Hilldales appears in several books, including Phil Dixon’s The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History and Neil Lanctot’s book about Hilldale, Fair Dealing and Cleaning Playing:

Lanctot obtained the photograph from the papers of Hilldale official Lloyd Thompson, and, presumably based on information drawn from that collection, identifies the third player standing from the left as “John Taylor.” 

Based on the connection between John Taylor of the Chicago Giants and Lincoln Giants and the John Taylor who earlier pitched for Hilldale, this is the photo I’ve used for Taylor at Seamheads.com.

Recently, I was looking at a team photo of the 1920 Chicago Giants that appears in Phil Dixon’s book:

The players Phil identifies are, standing L to R: unknown, Horace Jenkins, unknown, unknown, John Beckwith, Butler White, James Davis, unknown; kneeling L to R, Bobby Winston, Bobby Anderson, unknown, Joe Green, unknown, Willie Green, Thurman Jennings.

Some of the Chicago Giants players that year who aren’t identified (yet) in this photo include utility man Harry Jeffries, both Frank Duncans, Harry Bauchman, Luther Farrell…and John Taylor.  And Taylor was easily the Giants’ ace pitcher (if a guy who goes 2-11 can really be called an “ace”), so it would seem pretty likely that he’d be in the team picture.

But check out the unknown guy standing at the far left.  He looks a lot like the John Taylor in the 1917 Hilldale photo.  Here they are side by side:

I don’t know, though.  Sometimes I look at them and they seem obviously the same person, other times I start to think that the 1920 guy’s face is a bit too wide, his ears protruding a little too much.  Then again the 1920 photo’s blurrier.

If they are the same, that would obviously cement my identification of the 1917 John Taylor and the 1920s John Taylor as the same person.  Plus it would give us one more player in the 1920 photo, and narrow down the options for the other unidentified guys.

stars of cuba, 1910

Here, courtesy of the Hakes auction site and Cesar Brioso’s tumblr, is a wonderful photograph of the Stars of Cuba, a team that toured the United States during the summer of 1910.

For whatever reason the scrap of typescript attached to the photo says (inaccurately) that the team existed in 1912. Actually it was 1910.  Here are the correct names of the players and officials in the photo (so far as I know): 

Back row: Heliodoro Hidalgo (“Jabuco”); William C. Niesen; Marcelino Guerra (“Sueya”); ?? Jones; Rogelio Valdés.

Middle row: José Muñoz; Pelayo Chacón; José Méndez; Armando Cabañas; Pastor Pareda.

Front row: Ramón Govantes; Manuel Villa; Rafael Figarola.

I’m not sure why Marcelino Guerra is called “Sueya” (a nickname, maybe?).  As you can see, this photograph includes every player who appeared for the Stars of Cuba against other top black teams that year, with the sole exception of Juliân “Fallanca” Pérez.  Incidentally, this is the only photo I’ve seen of José Muñoz actually in a baseball uniform; he’s in other team pictures, but always wearing a suit and tie.

Missing from this photo are Eustaquio Pedroso and Allyn McAllister, and present are William Niesen, Armando Cabañas, and Guerra, which may give us a clue as to when it was taken. 

Allyn McAllister was the founder of the Stars of Cuba.  A bicycle shop proprietor from Chicago, McAllister entered the ranks of baseball promoters in the fall of 1909 when he organized a major league all-star team to play the Cuban League teams in Havana.  It was a genuine all-star team, too, featuring Three Finger Brown, Addie Joss, Sherry Magee, and Fred Merkle, although they only managed two wins in five games against Habana and Almendares. 

While in Cuba, McAllister decided to move in on Abel Linares’s turf, signing up Cuban players to tour the U.S. the following summer.  He plucked Linares’s prize asset, José Méndez, the biggest star in Cuban baseball, and some other good players, including José Muñoz and Eustaquio Pedroso, giving him Cuba’s top three pitchers.

Here is a detail from a passenger list for the S.S. Mascotte, arriving in Tampa on May 4, 1910, showing eight of the Stars of Cuba players travelling together:

 

It was after the team got to Chicago that the trouble started.  At some point Pedroso had defected to Linares’s Cuban Stars.  McAllister then sued Pedroso, contending that he had signed an exclusive contract with the Stars of Cuba.  In early June, a judge threw out McAllister’s suit on the grounds that the contract lacked “mutuality”—that is, Pedroso was required to play ball only for McAllister during 1910, but McAllister was not required to retain or pay Pedroso at all.  The story was picked up by the AP and popped up in newspapers all over the country, often with headlines that implied the decision invalidated all baseball contracts.  Francis Richter of Sporting Life felt it necessary to intervene, quoting the AP story and adding their own commentary about how the case had little bearing on organized baseball:

(Sporting Life, June 11, 1910, p. 4)

With Pedroso lost, the Stars of Cuba were weakened a little; and the problems didn’t stop there.  The team started cancelling dates in early July, causing some frustration among the local clubs.  One W. C. Niesen, manager of the Gunthers club, took a vocal role against McAllister.

(Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1910, p. 10)

Starting on July 10 the Stars of Cuba  rebelled against McAllister; they were now operating “under new management,” as the Chicago Examiner (July 20) would later explain—which apparently meant W. C. Niesen and his allies.  Their new handlers lined up a three-game series in mid-July between the Stars of Cuba and Linares’s Cuban Stars, with two of the games played at Artesian Park.  The Stars of Cuba, fortified by the addition of Armando Cabañas and Marcelino Guerra from Cuba, won the first two games; the last, on July 14 at Artesian Park, saw a matchup of aces, with Pedroso of the Cuban Stars besting Méndez 3 to 2.

With Cabañas and Guerra on the roster and McAllister gone, we now have the cast of characters that appears in the team photo above; Niesen’s boycott of the team seems to have been aimed at wresting control of it from McAllister, and there he his in the team photo, along with “Jones,” presumably some partner of Niesen.

On July 19 the Chicago City League banned its clubs from playing “colored teams” (other than the Chicago Giants, who were league members, of course), a decision widely understood to be aimed at the two Cuban clubs. This was another item about local Chicago baseball that was picked up by the AP and printed in newspapers all over the country.

 

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 19, 1910, p. 8)

This makes the fault lines in Chicago’s independent pro baseball scene that summer pretty clear, despite the forest of similar-sounding names (Cuban Stars, Stars of Cuba, Leland Giants, Leland’s Chicago Giants).  Keep in mind that Niesen’s Gunthers were not members of the Chicago City League, and neither were Rube Foster’s Chicago Leland Giants.  The previous winter, Foster had wrested control of the Leland Giants (and most of the team’s players) from eponymous founder Frank Leland.  Leland, enjoined from using the name “Leland Giants,” then organized his own team, referred to (confusingly) as Leland’s Chicago Giants.  Leland did convince the Chicago League to let him keep his team’s league franchise, thus the “new” Chicago Giants replaced the defending champion Leland Giants in the City League.

So on the one hand you had the Chicago City League, which included the city’s white semipro establishment, plus Frank Leland and his new Chicago Giants.  On the other hand you had Rube Foster’s Leland Giants and William C. Niesen, now controlling the Stars of Cuba as well as the Gunthers. One assumes that Allyn McAllister was originally aligned with the Chicago League, so his ouster from the Stars of Cuba may have been a large part of the reason for the League’s ban on games with the Cubans.  Abel Linares’s Cuban Stars of Havana, incidentally, played the Chicago Giants several times, but never once took the field against Foster’s Leland Giants, so they may have been more closely aligned with the City League crowd, despite their July games against Niesen’s Stars of Cuba.

On August 7 the Chicago Tribune reported that Allyn McAllister had obtained an injunction against the Stars of Cuba playing baseball under any management except his.

(Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1910, p. C2)

That day he showed up at Normal Park before a scheduled game between the Stars and Foster’s Leland Giants, flanked by three policemen and an interpreter.  It did not exactly go according to plan:

 

(Chicago Examiner, August 8, 1910, p. 8)

The Stars went ahead and played the game, losing to Frank Wickware and the Lelands 8 to 6.  A couple of days later they were hauled into court to explain themselves, but apparently the players (and, perhaps, Niesen) were able to reach some kind of settlement with McAllister:

 

(Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1910, p. 11)

(Chicago Examiner, August 12, 1910, p. 7)

A week or two after that the Stars of Cuba left for a series in Kansas City, Kansas, before returning to Chicago for some games against the Leland Giants.  Apparently the Stars of Cuba broke up soon after; by September 14 the team’s star and player-manager, José Méndez, had left to join the Linares Cuban Stars on the east coast.  As far as Allyn McAllister goes, this seems to have been the final chapter of his brief (and rather inglorious) career in baseball management.

1910 chicago giants

Courtesy of Todd Peterson, here’s a photo I had never seen before of the 1910 Chicago Giants, from the Twin City Star, July 21, 1910.

Standing, L to R: Walter Ball, Harry Moore, Steel Arm Johnny Taylor, Frank Leland, Bobby Winston, Joe Green, Danger Talbert

Seated, L to R: Nate Harris, Chappie Johnson, Bill Pettus, Cyclone Joe Williams, and Felix Wallace.