Agate Type

Topeka Jack Johnson, Part II

The 1907 Chicago Union Giants. Standing L to R: Will Horn, Topeka Jack Johnson. Seated, middle row, L to R: Albert Toney, Joe Green, Jimmy Smith, George Hopkins, Ginney Robinson, unknown. Seated, front row, L to R: unknown, Sam Strothers.

The puzzle about Topeka Jack Johnson is that, although you can outline his career in detail (at least for some years), it’s not really possible to figure out how good a baseball player he was. Currently there’s a grand total of 42 games for him against top flight black opposition in the Seamheads Negro Leagues DB. In these games he hit .247/.333/.331, for an OPS+ of 118—which sounds good, but it’s only 42 games, 178 plate appearances, scattered over 8 seasons. At best we have a very crude assessment that he was an above-average hitter in a little more than a month’s worth of games. Which is pretty much the same as saying we don't’ know anything.

Defensively, he’s even more out of focus, playing 19 games at second base, 12 at first, 8 at shortstop. He was tall and strong, sometimes described as a power hitter (relative to the times, of course), and probably had a decent arm (though he rarely appeared at third base). He tended to bat cleanup and play wherever he decided his team needed him. Aside from a few stints in Chicago, he played almost all of his whole career far from the hotbeds of blackball activity. He went to the east coast to box (once), but never to play baseball. He was never signed by any of the top teams of the time (the Philadelphia Giants, Leland Giants, Cuban X-Giants, etc.), He never went to Cuba. You’d have to concede that there’s not really any good evidence that he was anywhere near the class of the Pete Hills or Harry Buckners or the John Lloyds of the world. Maybe he was that good, but if so, the surviving record doesn’t back it up.

Instead, his significance rests on two other things: 1) his managerial career, most notably with the Kansas City (Kansas) Giants, who (with at least some justification) claimed the colored championship in 1909, and 2) his leadership in various efforst to organize black baseball leagues. His greatest achievements in both areas came during the 1909-1912 period.

We’ll pick up his story in 1907, after he returned from Philadelphia early in the spring. In March a scheduled fight in Omaha with the heavyweight Jim McCormick (the same guy he’d fought right before a game in 1906) was broken up by the police. A month later it was announced that Johnson was leaving Topeka and going back to the Chicago Union Giants as player/manager, although he still retained a partial interest in the Topeka Giants.

The Unions split their time between barnstorming trips through Illinois and surrounding states, and home stands in Chicago, where they played that city’s strong white semipro clubs, which often featured past or future major leaguers. On July 7, the Unions defeated the Artesians in Chicago 4 to 0, with Johnson swatting a home run. In the opposing lineup was a young Fred Merkle, playing third base. A week later Johnson got five hits off former Brooklyn Superbas pitcher Joe Koukalik (one of only nine major league players born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, unless I've missed somebody) as the Unions defeated another white semipro team, the Oak Leas, 7 to 2. At season’s end the Unions played their only known game against black opposition in 1907, defeating the St. Paul Gophers 10 to 4, Johnson contributing a double and a single to the cause.

Continuing his pattern of changing teams every year, Topeka Jack moved north to the Twin Cities for 1908, joining the Minneapolis Keystones (right) along with three of his players from the Unions: infielders Alex Irwin and George Hopkins, and pitcher Charles Jessup. Known in Minnesota as Chicago Jack, his main position was first base, but he appeared at all four infield positions plus right field. Todd Peterson was able to find box scores for 32 games against all opposition; Johnson batted .269 and led the team in triples and home runs. Facing off against the rival St. Paul Gophers, the Keystones lost the series 3 games to 2; in the three games that have box scores, Johnson hit 3 for 12 with a triple.

His next stop was Kansas City—Kansas, that is, where some local businessmen wanted to defeat the Kansas City Monarchs (from the Missouri side; the original club, not the one founded by J. L. Wilkinson in 1920). They built a new club with Johnson and several Topeka Giants, most notably Tullie McAdoo and the Norman brothers (third baseman Big Jim and pitcher Billy, also known as “Chin” or “Shin”), as the core. Johnson added some of his old Union Giants teammates as well as an Albuquerque catcher named Bill Pettus, whom he might have gotten to know through his boxing connections, as Pettus was also a promising fighter who had been to the west coast.

The Giants inaugurated the season by beating the rival Monarchs 8 to 3, getting 16 hits off their pitcher, a 17-year-old from Lexington, Missouri, named Bill Lindsay. His team may given the youngster a torrid time, but Johnson saw something in Lindsay, and would remember him later in the year. By April 29, the Kansas City Journal reported that the Giants had not yet lost (though the paper didn’t say how many games they had played). A couple of days later the Journal declared that “if Jack Johnson of the Kansas Giants could apply the whitewash brush, or send his men through a bleaching process, the chances are such men as McAdoo, J. Norman, Skinner and Pettus would not be in our midst very long.”

The Giants kept winning through the summer, playing mostly in the Kansas City area with a couple of road trips to St. Louis and Oklahoma. In June they faced Bill Lindsay and the Monarchs again, prevailing 1 to 0 after thirteen innings. On July 27, on the eve of the Giants’ biggest journey of the year, to Chicago, the Kansas City Journal reported that they had won 54 and lost none on the season. I’ve been able to document 29 wins, no losses, and 1 tie during that time (mostly due to the work of Patrick Rock in combing the Kansas City Journal for reportage on the Giants).

The 1909 Kansas City Giants, from the Kansas City Gazette Globe (August 21, 1909). The photo is mostly too blurry to allow for easy IDs, but I think the middle row is, L to R: Tullie McAdoo, Dee Williams, Tobe Smith, Topeka Jack Johnson, Tom Sterman. The player in the front, on the left side, might be Bill Pettus.

On July 28, en route to Chicago, the Giants defeated the Moquoketa, Iowa, team, 2 to 1. Arriving in the Windy City, they played their first game at Logan Square Park against the stiffest opposition they had faced that year, the Cuban Stars. In a pitching duel between Billy Norman and Cuban ace José Muñoz, the Cubans came out on top, 2 to 1. If the Journal’s earlier report was accurate, this ended their undefeated streak at 56 games (55 wins, one draw). In any case, it’s certainly the first loss of the year I’ve found for them.

The Kansas City Giants’ two weeks in Chicago gave them a dose of reality.  They dropped 8 of 12 games against the Cuban Stars, including two pretty brutal losses to the legendary José Méndez, who struck out 21 Giants in 18 innings. They also lost twice to white semipro teams, most notably to the River Forests and their pitcher Arthur “Doc” Hillebrand, a college star who famously refused to play in the majors, despite many offers.

One might think that the Giants returned chastened to Kansas City. They had come out well under .500, and they hadn’t even played the true kings of the hill in Chicago, Rube Foster’s Leland Giants. The two teams had scheduled a five-game series, but for whatever reason, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Lelands came to the Giants’ Riverside Park in Kansas City, Kansas, in late August, for a three-game series. Jack Johnson and his team had their shot at redemption.

The 1909 Leland Giants. Standing L to R: Pete Hill, Andrew Payne, George Wright, Walter Ball, Charles Dougherty, Bill Gatewood, Rube Foster. Seated L to R: Danger Talbert, Harry Moore, Frank Leland, Bobby Winston, Sam Strothers, Nate Harris.

The Lelands took the first game, 5 to 2, as Walter Ball shackled K.C. on two hits. In the second game, Jack Johnson unveiled his newest acquisition: Bill Lindsay, now 18, whom he had poached from the Monarchs. The young hurler had the Lelands at his mercy, striking out 16 and allowing only a single unearned run. With the score tied and bases loaded in the eighth inning, Jack hit a Texas leaguer to bring in two runs, and the Giants won, 3 to 1. In the third game, another eighth inning rally netted Kansas City a 5 to 4 win. “Kansas Giants Champions,” trumpeted the Kansas City Journal. The Kansas City Giants subsequently claimed the “colored baseball  championship of the United States.”

The Giants continued to win, though not quite at the frenzied pace they’d kept up before the Chicago trip. In September the San Antonio Black Bronchos of the Texas Colored League came to Riverside Park. The two teams split a four-game series, with the Giants defeating the Bronchos’ ace, Cyclone Joe Williams, 4 to 2 in the last game. (Jack Johnson went 0 for 4.) Overall, the Giants won 11 and lost 12 against top-flight black teams. The Leland Giants were 17-13 against similar opposition, not to mention champions of the tough Chicago City League, despite an injury-plagued season in which no fewer than three players (Rube Foster, Bobby Winston, and Joe Green) suffered broken legs. It’s difficult to take the Kansas City Giants’ two out of three victory over the Lelands as evidence of superiority.

The 1909 St. Paul Gophers (from Early Black Baseball in Minnesota, by Todd Peterson). Standing L to R: Steel Arm Johnny Taylor, Sherman Barton, Bobby Marshall, Phil Reid, Johnny Davis, Will McMurray, Dick Wallace. Seated L to R: Rabbit McDougall, Eugene Milliner, Candy Jim Taylor, William Binga, Julius London.

Not only that, but earlier in the season the Lelands had lost 3 games to 2 to the St. Paul Gophers in St. Paul, and the Gophers (11-2 overall against the best black opposition) subsequently claimed the informal colored championship. Rube Foster, at the end of the season, dismissed the Gophers’ claims. “These were only exhibition contests,” he claimed, “and no man who ever saw the Gophers play would think of classing them as world’s colored champions, or would think the playing ability of the other clubs was very weak. No doubt they need advertising” (Indianapolis Freeman, November 13, p. 7). He didn’t even mention the Kansas City Giants.

That’s enough for this post. In the next one I’ll talk about Jack Johnson’s role in founding (or attempting to found) various leagues as well as his career in boxing (and further encounters with the “real” Jack Johnson).

Topeka Jack Johnson, Part I

John Thomas “Jack” Johnson was a boxer and baseball player in the early 1900s. He had the misfortune of flourishing at exactly the same time as another Jack Johnson who was known to dabble in the sweet science. Consequently he became known as “Topeka Jack,” after his adopted hometown, in order to distinguish him from his famous namesake. Fittingly, given his nickname, he was perhaps the most important figure in the early history of the thriving black baseball scene in Topeka, which produced a number of players who went on to national prominence, including his brother-in-law and teammate, Tullie McAdoo. As a baseball player, manager, and league president, an early proponent of a “Negro National League” (and one of the first to use that phrase in a baseball context), and as a boxer and trainer of boxers, Topeka Jack Johnson left his mark on the history of African American sports in the midwest. And, as it happens, he was also a bit player in the life of the other Jack Johnson.

He was born on April 25, 1883, to Thomas and Sophia Johnson, a farm couple originally from Tennessee. Both were likely born into slavery (Thomas in 1847, Sophia in 1854). The family first appears in the 1895 Kansas State Census, living in Carbondale, Osage County, Kansas. Nothing is known of Jack Johnson’s youth until he graduated from Carbondale High School. By 1901 he had signed with the professional Chicago Unions, pitching and playing first base for them for that season and part of the next. Although he probably only played the last couple of months of the season, he gained a reputation as the “speediest pitcher” on the Unions. On October 20, holding down first base, Jack Johnson collected four hits as the Unions demolished the Auburn Parks 20 to 7.

At the start of 1902, the Unions’ shortstop, Dave Wyatt, had arranged for a young prospect named Andrew Foster to come north, but the Unions’ owner, Will Peters, never sent money for train fare. Although Foster was billed to pitch on opening day, Jack Johnson took his place. Foster would wind up with the Unions’ rivals, Frank Leland’s Union Giants, later that year. Johnson, on the other hand, left with a number of other Chicago ballplayers, many of them originally from Kansas, to join the Algona Brownies of Iowa.

Despite having already played as a professional, Johnson enrolled at Washburn University in Topeka in the spring of 1903 and joined the baseball team. It was reported that there was “some opposition to him owing to his color and it is not known just how far this will be carried.” In fact, Washburn had a history of accepting black athletes on its sports teams; in 1899 an opposing football team had walked off the field when Washburn announced its intention of fielding an African American named Farrar in the second half. Regardless of whatever mutterings there were, he lasted the baseball team’s whole spring season.

In May Johnson left for St. Marys, Kansas, to play ball (presumably semiprofessionally or professionally). Eventually that summer he joined Leland’s Union Giants, pitching and playing first base. In Chicago on August 30, Johnson held the Normals to four singles, striking out 13 to win 3 to 0. In November, with the Washburn baseball team considering its options for the following spring, it was reported that “Johnson, the colored man who pitched such good ball last year[,] is not now in school.” Around this time, according to some later accounts, he served as sparring partner for Jack Johnson, then an upcoming heavyweight on the west coast.

It was not surprising that Johnson would try his fists at boxing. He was 6’1” and 195 pounds, tall and strong, especially for the time. He started as a pitcher, again no surprise for someone of his height with a decent arm. In August 1903 the Iowa State Reporter remarked that he had “done service for a number of years as pitcher and change infielder.” But his career turned fairly quickly away from the mound, and more in the direction of being an everyday player, mostly as a first baseman and shortstop.  “He is a big shorstop,” the Topeka Daily Capital commented, “but he is fast and covers his territory in giltedge fashion.”

He returned to W. S. Peters’s team, now also called the Union Giants, in 1904, batting cleanup and playing mostly as a first baseman. (The name “Union Giants” became the subject of a legal fight between Peters and Leland.) On July 26, they faced a young Eddie Cicotte in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, pitching for the local semipro Soo Baseball Club. Cicotte set the Union Giants down on 4 hits, striking out 10. Johnson went 0-for-4 against the future World Series-fixing member of the Chicago White Sox, though he made contact every time up. It was also during this year that he married Elizabeth McAdoo of Topeka.

By 1905, at the still tender age of 22, Jack Johnson took his first step into a leadership role, becoming the manager and captain of Peters’s team. The Unions were now the only “Union Giants” left, Leland having renamed his club the Leland Giants. According to the Topeka Plaindealer, the Unions had a “very successful season.” On April 30 they lost to the Kenosha, Wisconsin, independent team, 10 to 9, but raked the Kenosha pitcher, Lou Fiene, who would later pitch for the White Sox, for 13 hits. Johnson collected two singles. As the season wound down, the Unions engaged their arch-rivals, the Lelands, in a contest for local supremacy. A contentious series, punctuated by fights, ended in a draw, each team winning one game, with two games tied.

The 1905 Chicago Union Giants, L to R: Alex Irwin, Willis Jones, Fred Roberts, Haywood Rose, William Washington, Harry Hyde, Clarence Lytle, George Hopkins, Topeka Jack Johnson, George Taylor.

In August an incident occurred that Johnson would later call the greatest play he had ever seen. The African American team sponsored by J. W. Jenkins & Sons of Kansas City, Missouri, claimed to be undefeated, and traveled to Chicago to play the Union Giants for the “colored baseball championship of the United States.” During the game, with a man on first, a Jenkins batter sent a “sharply hit ball” toward second baseman Fred Roberts. It bounced once, then Roberts fumbled it, the ball dropping to the ground in front of him. Frustrated by his error, and assuming everybody was safe, he kicked the ball—right to shortstop Alex Irwin waiting at second, waist-high, a perfect double play ball. Irwin caught it and relayed to Johnson at first to complete it.

After three years of travelling with Chicago-based teams, Johnson was ready to return home. He organized a new team, the Topeka Giants, bringing a few players with him from the Unions and getting the rest from local sources, some of them his former teammates on Topeka teams such as the Nine Bees or Gaitha Page’s Giants.  Johnson himself took over as shortstop, and hired his brother-in-law, Tullie McAdoo, to hold down first base.

His prizefighting career was also getting off the ground. Still only 23, according to the Topeka Daily Capital he had “won some important matches and gives promise of developing into a topnotcher if he gets into the right circles.” On April 18 he showed he could handle taking part in two professional sports simultaneously:

(Topeka Daily Capital, April 19, 1906, p. 7)

The Giants toured the Midwestern states. They mostly played white amateur or semipro teams in smaller towns, but in August they travelled to Chicago to take on two of the biggest African American clubs in the business, both teams Johnson had played for: the Union Giants and the Leland Giants. Behind pitcher William “Shin” Norman, the Topeka Giants beat the Lelands 4 to 2 on August 12. After this good start, Johnson’s club dropped the next decision to the Lelands, 3 to 1, and lost both ends of a doubleheader to the Unions, 3 to 2 and 5 to 0.

When baseball season was over Johnson took a meatpacking job in Topeka to keep in shape, then in December he went east to Philadelphia (the heavyweight boxing “Mecca”) to further his boxing career. A Topeka Daily Capital piece about his move contains the earliest mention I’ve seen of the “Topeka Jack” nickname, which makes it fairly explicit that it originated to differentiate him from that other Jack Johnson.

(Topeka Daily Capital, December 7, 1906)

In Part II, we’ll follow Jack through the heyday of his baseball career, as manager of the Kansas City (Kansas) Giants and the Kansas City Royal Giants.

chicago union giants, undated broadside

The 1911 Chicago Union Giants panoramic postcard that Brian Campf sent me recently reminds of another fantastic Union Giants image, this one a broadside shown to me by Jason Miller last year. I was going to post it then, but other things got in the way, and I never got around to it. So, with apologies to Jason, here it is at last:

On the bottom it says “Will Play at Rockford July 8.” That could refer to Rockford, Illinois, where the Union Giants regularly played circa 1910-1911, although I haven’t found a Union Giants game reported on exactly that date during those years. (It might also refer to other Rockfords, such as the one in Minnesota or the one in Michigan.)

Here’s a detail of the team:



Jason was unsure of the exact year of the broadside and the identities of the players, and I couldn’t help him much at the time. But comparison with Brian’s postcard, which has been definitively dated to September 6, 1911, shows that several of the same players appear in both—so Jason’s broadside must date from sometime around 1911, though maybe not that year precisely. Here are the ones whose identity we can be pretty sure of (1911 postcard on left, undated broadside on right):

Bob Gilkerson, who played for the Union Giants from 1909 to 1916 (in 1917 he founded the Lost Island Giants, and in 1919 Gilkerson’s Union Giants). He was captain of the Union Giants in 1911 and 1912.

Horace Jenkins, Union Giants 1910-1914

Sam Gordon, Union Giants 1909 to 1912 (late in 1912 he joined the French Lick Plutos, and in 1913 he became their manager).

Lefty Harvey, Union Giants 1910-1912

The presence of Jenkins and Harvey in the broadside would narrow down its date to 1910 to 1912.

Of the other players we’ve identified in Brian’s postcard, Albert Toney and Haywood Rose seem to have played for the Union Giants only in 1911 (Rose is listed on a Union Giants roster once in 1912, but I haven’t found a box score showing him playing for the team.) Neither of them seems (to me) to be in Jason’s broadside—which would be an indication that the broadside might date from 1910 and 1912, but probably not 1911. (Although Toney joined the team partway through the 1911 season.)

There are four players who probably appear on Brian’s 1911 postcard who aren’t matched to a specific face:

Guy Jackson, Union Giants 1910-1911
Mack Ramsey, Union Giants 1909-1917
Ed Lee, Union Giants 1910-1911
Hub Alexander, Union Giants 1911-1914

At least two of these still-unidentified players are also on the 1910-1912 broadside (again, 1911 postcard on left, undated broadside on right):

Lee, Ramsey, and Jackson all appeared for the Union Giants in 1910, but not Alexander (as far as I know); Guy Jackson and Ed Lee didn’t play for the Union Giants in 1912, but Ramsey and Alexander did. Given that two of these four appear in the broadside, that would seem to be an indication that the broadside dates from 1912, as the 1912 Union Giants shared only two of these players with the 1911 edition, while the 1910 Union Giants had three of them. If the broadside shows the 1912 team, then the two players pictured above might be Ramsey and Alexander, though which is which is still unknown.

I might also have a line on one of the unknown players in Jason’s 1910-1912 broadside, a player holding a catcher’s mitt (at right).

In 1910 and 1911 Gordon and Washington caught for the Union Giants; in 1910 there’s a third one, usually identified in the box scores as “B. Jones” (to distinguish him from outfielder Willis Jones). (I haven’t found his first name yet.)

And the 1912 Union Giants also used a third catcher. An article by Bob Gilkerson in the March 16, 1912, issue of The Freeman (Indianapolis), mentions the presence of “Armstroad [sic], the St. Paul Gophers’ reliable catcher,” who “will help old warhorse Gordon to cut off the men from pilfering bases.” He’s referring to George “Mule” Armstrong, who did indeed catch for the Union Giants that season.  Here’s a comparison of the unidentified player with the catcher’s mitt from Jason’s broadside (on the left) with the only two photos I have of Mule Armstrong (on the right).

The catcher in the broadside looks intriguingly similar to the first picture of Armstrong (in the middle), but not so much to the second one, and in any case the eyebrows are a problem, in my opinion.

If Armstrong is in the broadside, that would be a very solid reason to think that it dates from 1912 rather than 1910—but I can’t go there just yet. Careful work might just tell us for sure, and might also help to sort out the unidentified players on Brian’s 1911 postcard.

Lastly, there’s one player I can identify in Jason’s broadside who is not in Brian’s 1911 postcard.

 

This is, I believe, a catcher named William Washington. The picture of Washington on the right is from this 1908 postcard of the Union Giants, which is also from Brian Campf. Washington played for the Union Giants earlier in 1911, but was apparently not with the team in the Upper Peninsula in September. He was also with the team for part of 1912. So his presence in the broadside is not inconsistent with either 1910 or 1912.

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.

chicago union giants, 1911

Check out this amazing panoramic postcard from Brian Campf:

This was taken in the town of Daggett, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on September 6, 1911, the day of a game between W. S. Peters’s Chicago Union Giants and the local Daggett team. The Union Giants are the ten players on the right.

Thanks to some detective work by Brian, Todd Peterson, Larry Lester, and myself, we’ve identified six of the ten Union Giants. Here’s the box score for the Daggett game, which Brian obtained from the Menominee County Library:

This gives us nine of the Union Giants players. What about the tenth? The Union Giants played a doubleheader in Escanaba, Michigan, two days earlier, on Labor Day (September 4, 1911). Here are the box scores (courtesy of Todd):

 

(Escanaba Morning Press, September 6, 1911, p.8)

Here we have the same nine players as in Daggett, plus a tenth: the pitcher Hub Alexander. To return to Brian’s postcard:

 

In order, from left to right:

1) Robert Gilkerson, the Union Giants’ captain and second baseman

2) Sam Gordon, the Union Giants’ manager and catcher

3) Horace Jenkins, outfielder/pitcher

4) (unknown)

5) (unknown)

6) (unknown)

7) Haywood “Kissing Bug” Rose, catcher / first baseman

8) (unknown)

9) Albert Toney, shortstop

10) Lefty Harvey, pitcher/outfielder

There remain four players whose faces we can’t match to names (4, 5, 6, and 8): Ed Lee (outfielder), Guy Jackson (third baseman), Mack Ramsey (outfielder), and (possibly) Hub Alexander (pitcher). If anybody has any ideas about which is which, let me know.

chicago union giants, 1908

Brian Campf has been trying to identify the players on this postcard showing the 1908 Chicago Union Giants at Wheatfield, Illinois, on August 17, postmarked at Wheatfield, August 25, 1908.  Todd Peterson, who would be the real expert here, identifies the player standing third from right as outfielder Joe Green, which looks right to me. This would be the summer before he tried to score on a broken leg against the Cubs.

Todd has also made educated guesses that the guy standing third from left is catcher Tom Washington, and that first on the left stands infielder James Smith.  Based on box scores for the Union Giants around this time, the other players probably include (in no particular order) “diminutive” catcher/oufielder William Primm; infielders Albert Toney, Frank Young, and Wesley Pryor; outfielder Bob Ramsey; and first baseman Robinson (possibly Al or James?).

Brian would welcome input from anybody who has any more precise ideas or information about who’s who in this photo.

chicago union giants, 1905

Todd Peterson, author of the fantastically detailed and highly recommended Early Black Baseball in Minnesota, sends in the following correction about the players in the 1905 Chicago Union Giants photo I posted a few days ago:

“Bill Irwin is actually Alex Irwin; Clarence Lyttle is Clarence Lytle; and that is ‘Topeka’ Jack Johnson and not ‘Chappie’ Johnson leaning second from right.  Eight of the ten men pictured played for the St. Paul Gophers or Minneapolis Keystones (or both) at one point or another.”

So the Union Giants in the photo are, L to R: Alex Irwin, Willis Jones, Fred Roberts, Haywood Rose, Tom Washington, Harry Hyde, Clarence Lytle, George Hopkins, Topeka Jack Johnson, and George Taylor.

Todd also sent along photos of Alex Irwin and Topeka Jack Johnson:

    

not the american giants

The team in this photo has been identified at the Library of Congress American Memory site and consequently elsewhere on the internet as the 1911 Chicago American Giants:

I probably don’t have to tell readers of this blog that these aren’t the American Giants.  Rather, they’re the Chicago Union Giants, as you can tell from the logo on their jerseys. 

According to Black Baseball in Chicago, by Larry Lester, Sammy J. Miller, and Dick Clark, these are the 1905 Union Giants, managed by William Peters, and the players are, from left to right: Bill Irwin, Willis Jones, Fred Roberts, Haywood Rose, Tom Washington, Harry Hyde, Clarence Lyttle, George Hopkins, Chappie Johnson, and George Taylor.

UPDATE 5/6/2011 New information from Todd Peterson on the Union Giants players in this photo.