Agate Type

the latest on chino smith

New research in passenger lists has increased confidence that we’ve got the right man in the search for Dobie Moore. It’s done the same for Charles “Chino” Smith, the legendarily pugnacious high-average hitter for the Lincoln Giants and Royal Giants in the late 1920s.

Smith is usually said (based probably on Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia) to have been born in 1903 (no specific date) in Greenwood, South Carolina. However, back in 2011 I wrote that I had found a passenger list showing George Scales returning from Puerto Rico in the spring of 1926, after spending the winter there along with a whole team of Negro leaguers from New York (members of the Lincoln Giants and Royal Giants). Listed right below Scales was one Charles Smith, born September 24, 1901, in “Hamet,” North Carolina. While there is no Hamet in either of the Carolinas, there is a Hamlet, North Carolina, in Richmond County, right on the border with South Carolina.

Recently I came across a passenger list which showed all of the Negro league players travelling together and arriving in Puerto Rico on November 25, 1925.

Here we have, along with Scales and the other players, Charles Smith, born on September 24, 1901—the same birthdate as the Charles Smith accompanying Scales back to the U.S. in March, 1926—except this time his birth place is listed as “Society Hall,” South Carolina.

It so happens that, based on Smith’s death certificate, I was able to find his family in South Carolina in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census. In the last two the Smith family, including Charlie, lived in Society Hill, Darlington County, South Carolina—which is just 30 miles from Hamlet, North Carolina. It seems inescapable that the Charles Smith on the 1925 list of passengers arriving in Puerto Rico is the same person as the Charles Smith on the 1926 list of passengers arriving in New York, and that both are the ballplayer Chino Smith.

But what about the conflicting birth places—“Society Hall” (Society Hill), South Carolina, and “Hamet,” North Carolina? There could many reasons for this. Smith clearly spent much of his childhood in Society Hill (at least from age 8 to 18, and possibly more), and we don’t know exactly how the information on these passenger lists was compiled. It could be that in one instance he was asked where he was born, and in another instance what his hometown was.

Whatever the reason, it turns out that on at least two more passenger lists, Smith gave “Hamlet, North Carolina,” correctly spelled, as his birth place. First, returning to the U.S. from Cuba after the Cuban winter season on January 17, 1927:

And again returning to the U.S. from Cuba on January 24, 1928, two days after playing in the last game of the 1927/28 Cuban League season:

While Smith’s census records in 1910, 1920, and 1930, plus his death certificate, list his birthplace as South Carolina (nothing more specific), three out of four passenger lists give Hamlet, North Carolina. We may never have anything more authoritative, since birth records from before about 1910 were not consistently kept, especially for African American children in the South. Based on what we do know, my inclination is to go with Hamlet.

Putting everything together, we’ve experienced kind of a revolution in our understanding of Chino Smith, at least in terms of some basic facts.

• Instead of being born in Greenwood, South Carolina, in 1903, he appears more likely to have been born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 24, 1901.

• As David Lawrence pointed out to me last year, he was not quite the 5’6” “compact dynamo” described by James Riley. Check out this photo of the Lincoln Giants at the first Negro league game in Yankee Stadium in 1930:

From left to right, here are the players pictured, along with their “official” heights from various sources: Jesse Hubbard (6’2”), John Henry Lloyd (5’11”), Nip Winters (6’5”), Chino Smith (5’6”), Bill Yancey (5’9”), Bill Holland (5’9”).  The disparities here show you some of the difficulties in determining player heights from this era. Hubbard and Lloyd look to be about the same height, whereas both Holland and Smith seem clearly a little taller than Yancey in between. Smith is a few inches shorter than Winters, but certainly not eleven inches shorter. Winters might have been more like 6’3” or so; even so, Smith looks more like he might have been 5’10” or 5’11”, perhaps an inch shorter than Lloyd. At any rate there’s really no way he was only 5’6”.

• During his career, he was called (without exception, that I’ve found) “Charlie Smith” in U.S. newspapers, never “Chino.” This is the basis for his appearing in the Seamheads DB as Charlie Smith (though I may change that, since our search box doesn’t call up nicknames, making it hard to find him). In my limited sampling of Cuban newspapers for the 1927/28 season, I’ve seen him referred to as “el chino” (in lower case), but not as “Chino Smith.” The earliest I’ve seen the nickname used as a proper name is in a column by Cumberland Posey in the Pittsburgh Courier for November 30, 1935, when Posey calls him “Cheno Smith.”

• His home park for his greatest seasons was the bizarrely tiny Catholic Protectory Oval, shaped like a miniature Polo Grounds, with the outfield fence only 180 feet away down the foul lines (although in the deepest part of the park the fences were 358 feet from home plate). While there’s no doubt he was a talented hitter (and we don’t know what kind of ground rules may have been in effect at the Protectory), the size and shape of his home field are facts that anybody who wants to assess him as a player will have to grapple with.

• As I have written before (first in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin in 2010, then in this post) according to his death certificate Charlie Smith did not die of yellow fever, but rather of stomach and pancreatic cancer.

the death (and life) of charles “chino” smith

Charles Smith, now usually known as “Chino” (his nickname in Cuba), but called simply “Charlie Smith” in the newspapers of the late 1920s, died in New York City in the early hours of the morning on January 15, 1932.  Aged only 31 at his death, “Smitty” was eulogized by the Homestead Grays’ Cumberland Posey as “one of the best hitters of all time” (Pittsburgh Courier, January 23, 1932).  The New York Amsterdam News called him one of baseball’s “most outstanding characters and an all-time hitter whose ability drew many fans to the games in which he appeared” (January 27, 1932).  He was a pugnacious, crowd-baiting hitter of ferocious line drives who terrified pitchers. Satchel Paige deemed him one of the two toughest outs he ever faced (the other being Jud Wilson).

Smith’s statistics in the 1929 American Negro League were unworldly:

Smith led the ANL with a .464 average, 214 total bases, and a .903 slugging percentage (Rap Dixon was a distant second in the last two categories with 189 and .784).  Of course, this was in a league that batted .317 with a .448 slugging percentage, and it was in the Bronx’s Catholic Protectory Oval, a park that was only 180 feet down the lines on both sides.  Still, Smith comfortably outhit his Lincoln Giants’ teammate John Beckwith (.443, .776), and nobody else on the Lincolns, a team that challenged for the pennant (and by some accounts actually had the best overall record in the league), was even remotely close to Smith’s numbers.  It was not a bad year for Mr. Charles Smith.

According to John Holway in Blackball Stars, Bill Holland thought that Smith might have died of yellow fever.  Holway also notes that Smith’s death could have been linked to an on-field collision with Walter Cannady during a Lincolns-Homestead Grays game at Yankee Stadium on September 28, 1930, when Cannady accidentally kneed Smith in the stomach, and Smith had to be carried off, as shown in this photo from the New York Amsterdam News (October 1, 1930).   Incidentally, the day before (Saturday, September 27) Josh Gibson reputedly hit the only home run ever to leave Yankee Stadium (though the story has probably been greatly exaggerated).


Even in this poor reproduction, Oscar Charleston of the Grays is recognizable behind Smith.  Various accounts have it that Smith was knocked unconscious, which of course sounds more like a blow to the head than to the stomach.

Although he never played for the Lincoln Giants again, Smith had recovered sufficiently by November to appear in the special “Unico” championship in Cuba.  The following spring he joined the Brooklyn Royal Giants and spent the whole season with them, though he did miss quite a few games.

His death came on January 15, 1932.  Here’s his death certificate (which I originally published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, July 21, 2010):

Chino Smith died, not of yellow fever, but of stomach and pancreatic cancer, made worse by exhaustion.  John Holway’s report about Cannady kneeing Smith in the stomach might be the product of vague memories about Smith having stomach trouble in the months before his death, conflated with the dramatic incident at Yankee Stadium in 1930 that marked the end of his Lincoln Giants career.

Charlie Smith’s body was shipped to Darlington, South Carolina, where his family had lived at least since the 1910 census was taken.

Which raises the question of his birth place and date.  The death certificate (January, 1932) has him aged 31; in the 1930 census “Charles Smith,” “Ball Player,” born in South Carolina and living in Harlem with his wife Bessie, is listed as aged 29.  In the 1910 census young Charles E. Smith, living with his parents Thomas and Leila and several siblings in Society Hill, Darlington County, South Carolina, is listed as aged 9.  (Incidentally, Smith’s mother, according to his death certificate, was “Lelia Anthrum”; the Smith family in Society Hill in 1910 lived next door to a family named Antrum.)

In the winter of 1925/26 a number of Negro league players from New York City traveled to Puerto Rico, presumably to play ball.  I have not yet found any kind of public record of a Negro league tour of the island or of North American players being hired by teams that winter, but various players can be found on passenger lists returning from San Juan to New York from January through April, 1926.  These included Chino Smith’s Brooklyn Royal Giants’ teammates Dick Redding, Connie Rector, Charles Spearman, and Bob Scott, along with George Scales, Merven Ryan, Tom Finley, Richard Gee, Judy Gans, and Bardell (or Budell) Young of the Lincoln Giants. 

When George Scales returned to the U.S. from Puerto Rico aboard the S.S. Caracas on March 8, 1926, he was accompanied by one Charles Smith, on a passenger list that otherwise consisted entirely of Hispanic names:



This Charles Smith had a Harlem address (4 W. 129th St.), and was listed as born in “Hamet,” North Carolina, on September 24, 1901.  There is no “Hamet” in either of the Carolinas, but there is a Hamlet, North Carolina, which is located in Richmond County, right on the border with South Carolina—about 30 miles away from Society Hill, South Carolina.

Coincidentally, Hamlet was also the hometown of John Coltrane, who was born there on September 23, 1926.  Coltrane’s playing, like Smith’s, has been described as aggressive, even angry; did they also share a hometown and (nearly) a birthday?

  

catholic protectory oval

One of the most remarkable settings for Negro league baseball was the Catholic Protectory Oval in the Bronx, home of the New York Lincoln Giants in the 1920s.  The Lincolns’ original home, Olympic Field in Harlem, had been built by the club’s founders, Roderick James “Jess” McMahon and his brother Edward*, for their white semipro club, the Olympic A.C., back in 1905.  The McMahons lost control of both Olympic Field and the Lincoln Giants in 1915, founding a new black club, the Lincoln Stars, which played at Lenox Oval for a couple of seasons.  The Lincoln Giants, under the ownership of James J. Keenan and Charles Harvey, continued at Olympic until 1920.

(*-Jess McMahon was eventually best known as a boxing and wrestling promoter, an associate of Tex Rickard and Carlos Henriquez.  You’ve heard of his grandson.)

At the start of the 1920 season Olympic Field was torn down, and its bleachers were transferred to the ball field at the Catholic Protectory, a famous orphanage in the Bronx.  Sunday semipro and amateur games had been played there for a couple of decades, but the coming of the famous African-American team would bring much larger crowds.

Here’s an illustration of the Catholic Protectory from sometime before 1920, with the Oval situated in the center left.  The outfield bleachers had not been installed yet.  (From Lawrence Ritter’s East Side, West Side: Tales of New York Sporting Life, 1910-1960.)

Here’s a diagram from a Sanborn fire insurance map, showing the Oval in 1929, the year the Lincolns joined the American Negro League, the short-lived successor to the Eastern Colored League:

And here, courtesy of Kevin Johnson (who has written a couple of posts on the 1928 Negro leagues), is a fantastic aerial photo of the Catholic Protectory Oval in 1924, the Lincolns’ second season in the ECL:

The scorekeeper’s table was placed under the trees visible here along the right field line.

Aside from the neo-Gothic architecture surrounding it, the other unusual feature of the Oval was its cramped shape.  Kevin asked the ballpark expert Ron Selter, author of Ballparks of the Deadball Era, to estimate the dimensions.  This is what he came up with:

LF 180
SLF 238
LC 358 (deepest point in park)
CF 292 (the HP-CF axis hit the CF end of the RF-CF bleachers)
RC 286
SRF 256
RF 180

Ron remarked (to Kevin) that it reminded him of “a miniature version of the playing field at the Polo Grounds.”

The data I’ve gathered definitely suggests that the Catholic Protectory Oval increased offense by huge amounts.  Any hitter with the Lincoln Giants in the 1920s—I’m looking at you, Chino Smith—probably saw his stats greatly inflated by the park, in the midst of what was already a very high-scoring era.

The Lincoln Giants’ successors in the 1930s, most notably the New York Black Yankees, moved to other venues; and in 1938 the Catholic Protectory was razed to make way for the Parkchester Apartments.

UPDATE 3/1/2011 Corrected dates on the map & aerial photo.