Agate Type

the negro league you’ve never heard of: the national association 1907-1909

The first “Negro league,” which I would define as a professional circuit explicitly dedicated to clubs staffed by black players, was the League of Colored Base Ball Clubs, or the National Colored League, of 1887. The NCL was as national in its range as the major leagues of the time, its six clubs including Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Lousville, and Baltimore. This proved to be way too ambitious, considering the limited resources available; the league collapsed within a couple of weeks, leaving players stranded in faraway cities.  It was fully twenty years before another “Negro league” would emerge, with a very different scope and somewhat reduced ambition: the National Association of Colored Base Ball Clubs of the United States and Cuba.  Virtually nothing has ever been written about this league, which seems to have lasted no fewer than three seasons, from 1907 to 1909.

Let me begin, though, the year before this Negro league got started, with a different league that was in important ways its predecessor.  In 1906 William Freihofer, who owned a chain of bakeries in the Philadelphia area as well as a white semi-pro club called the Philadelphia Professionals, organized the International League of Independent Professional Base Ball Clubs, which in its original form consisted of two black clubs, two Cuban clubs, and one white team:

(Sporting Life, April 14, 1906, p. 17)

A quick rundown on the International League’s original teams:

•Cuban X Giants, owned/managed by E. B. Lamar;
•Philadelphia Quaker Giants, owned by Jess and Eddie McMahon, managers of Olympic Field in Manhattan;
•Cuban Stars of Havana (originally called the Cuban Stars of Santiago, though this was quickly dropped), owned by Manuel Camps, a Cuban immigrant and Brooklyn cigar manufacturer, and booked by E. B. Lamar;
•Havana Stars (also called the Havana Club or just the Havanas), owned/managed by Alfredo Pastor, a Cuban baseball official, and booked by E. B. Lamar;
•Philadelphia Professionals, owned by Freihofer himself and managed by John A. O’Rourke, the league’s secretary/treasurer.

Freihofer also provided a “handsome silver cup” to be awarded to the league champions at season’s end:

(Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, p. 114)

In some ways, the International League looks to us more like a tournament than what we would consider a league. The original plans were for a five-team league to play an 8-game “season,” with every club playing every other club twice.  Needless to say, the league clubs played a number of games against each other that didn’t count officially in the standings, and played many, many games against non-league opponents.  The Philadelphia Giants, for example, played a total of 145 games in 1906, but would only play five official International League contests.

The race for the Freihofer Cup claimed several casualties.  The Havana Stars were the first to succumb, falling apart in early June, with several of the players being poached by other International clubs.  Their place in the league was at first to be taken by the Wilmington (Del.) Giants, a team led by the old Cuban Giants veteran George L. Williams, but league secretary John A. O’Rourke eventually decided to admit the Riverton-Palmyra (N.J.) Athletic Club, another white team, instead (Philadelphia Inquirer, June 24, 1906, Sports, p. 2).

In July the Quaker Giants and the Cuban Stars both failed to make scheduled appearances and were dropped from the league (though they continued to exist), and their places (and records) were taken over by the Philadelphia Giants and the Wilmington Giants (“New Teams in International League,” Trenton Evening Times, July 24, 1906, p. 11). The Philly Giants, inheriting the Quakers’ 3-0 record, were immediately installed as favorites to win the Freihofer Cup (“What the Future Greats Are Doing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 5, 1906, Sports, p. 2).

On Labor Day, September 3, playing in the Philadelphia Athletics’ Columbia Park, the Philadelphia Giants, behind Rube Foster, defeated the Cuban X-Giants and Harry Buckner 3 to 2, clinching the International League championship.  Here are the final standings:

(Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 1906, p. 10)

The Inquirer was pretty optimistic about the circuit’s future prospects: “The league despite, several drawbacks, weathered all the storms of the first year and the prospects of a bigger and stronger circuit next summer are indeed encouraging” (ibid.).

As I said, I wouldn’t consider the 1906 International to be a “Negro league,” strictly speaking, due to the presence of the two white teams. But it was the predecessor to a genuine Negro league.

 

(Trenton Evening Times, October 29, 1906, p. 11)

I used to think that the National Association was an outright continuation of the International League, just with the white clubs dropped; but I no longer think that was the case, given the name change, the absence of Freihofer and his Cup, and the fact that the new league had little to do with Philadelphia (nearly all of the 1907 games between its clubs were played in New York and New Jersey).  The key alliance was now between Walter Schlichter of the Philadelphia Giants and Nat C. Strong of New York, who was consolidating his control of independent baseball on the east coast.

Some of the men behind the National Association: Walter Schlichter, John Connor, Nat Strong, John Bright.

Standings for the 1907 National Association were published somewhat more erratically than for the 1906 International League, though they did appear every so often. In the end the Philadelphia Giants were again the champions.

 

(Trenton Evening Times, October 14, 1907, p. 11)

I haven’t found final published standings for the 1907 National Association, but here’s how each club fared against the other teams in the league:

              Philadelphia Giants: 13-7-0
              Cuban Giants:         5-5-1
              Royal Giants:        10-14-1
              Cuban Stars:          2-4-0

The league still existed in 1908, its membership unchanged:

(Indianapolis Freeman, March 21, 1908, p. 6)

It’s unclear exactly when they clinched it, but on September 28 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle asserted that the Royal Giants had already won “the championship for 1908 of the colored League of the United States.”

Here are the records of each club against other league members in 1908.  The Royal Giants seemed to have deserved that championship:

                Royal Giants:        19-10-1
                Philadelphia Giants: 16-15-0
                Cuban Giants:         6-12-1
                Cuban Stars:          3-7-0

The National Association lasted through the 1909 season:

(Sporting Life, December 19, 1908, p. 8)

There was very little coverage of the 1909 pennant race. According to Nat Strong, the Cuban Stars and Royal Giants were engaged in a series that would decide the championship in late September and early October, and the Royal Giants had won the first two games:

(Indianapolis Freeman, December 18, 1909, p. 7)

I’ve been able to find three games between the Cuban Stars and Royal Giants in September.  The Royal Giants beat the Cubans 5 to 3 on September 6 at the Bronx Oval, then won again 2 to 1 on September 12 at Meyerrose Park in Brooklyn.  The Cuban Stars turned the tables for a 4 to 2 win at the Bronx Oval on September 21. In a later letter to the Freeman (December 18, 1909), Strong said the Royal Giants had won the championship, and maintained that “the usual colored championship series will be played during the season of 1910.”

Again, the records of each club against the other National Association clubs for 1909:

                   Royal Giants:        9-3
                Cuban Stars:         8-5
                Philadelphia Giants: 6-12
                Cuban Giants:        0-3

Despite Strong’s confident assertions, in 1910 there’s no hint of the National Association of Colored Base Ball Clubs of the United States and Cuba.  If I had to guess I’d say that it was done in by 1) the decline of the Genuine Cuban Giants; 2) the Cuban Stars’ increasing involvement in the Midwestern game as they spent more and more time in and around Chicago and less on the east coast; and 3) Nat Strong’s realization of the money he could make pitting his Royal Giants against white semipro and town teams in both New York City and upstate New York.  

In fact, Strong would remain for years the biggest obstacle to organizing the eastern blackball teams, and there would be no eastern league until he was persuaded to lend his (half-hearted) support to the ECL in 1923. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Giants, the first truly great African American baseball team, were strangled by the lack of good opponents in the east, which caused them to take long, expensive, and ultimately unsustainable western jaunts in pursuit of better paydays.

As far as I can tell two players appeared in both the first Negro league (the National Colored League of 1887) and the second one (the National Association of 1907-1909): Sol White, 19-year-old third baseman for the 1887 Pittsburg Keystones, and veteran player-manager for the champion 1907 Philadelphia Giants; and John Nelson, who pitched for both the 1887 New York Gorhams and the 1908 Genuine Cuban Giants.

Old school: John Nelson and Sol White

 

UPDATE 2/6/2014 Just realized I forgot the 1886 Southern League of Colored Base Ballists, which certainly qualifies as a Negro league per the above definition.

cuban X giants, 1905

The following photograph of the 1905 Cuban X Giants, originally published in Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball (1907), was recently auctioned off at Hake’s.

The Hake’s description identifies only a single player: kneeling, second from right, is supposedly Grant “Home Run” Johnson.  Unfortunately Grant Johnson didn’t play for the 1905 Cuban X Giants, and he’s not in the photograph.  It sold for $5,603.71, and one hopes that the buyer didn’t spend this money solely because of the claim that Johnson is pictured.

Johnson did play for, and captain, the Cuban X Giants in 1903 and 1904, and he continued with E. B. Lamar’s team when they travelled to Cuba in the fall of 1904.  But in 1905 he switched, along with pitcher Danny McClellan and utility man Harry Moore, to the X-Giants’ great rivals, the Philadelphia Giants.  Veteran first baseman Ray Wilson took over as X-Giants captain, and Lamar made use of his Cuban connections to refurbish his roster, hiring a couple of Cuban players in the course of 1905, pitcher José Muñoz and infielder Rogelio Valdés.

Aside from Hake’s mistakenly placing Johnson on the team and in the photo, there’s been another discussion of the identities of the players here, so I thought I’d chip in with my take on who they are.

STANDING, L to R: unknown, Ray Wilson, Edward B. Lamar, Rogelio Valdés, John Patterson, Clarence Williams

KNEELING, L to R: Frank Grant, Bobby Winston, Johnny Hill, John Nelson, Harry Buckner

I’ll leave aside the unknown player for now.  Let’s go through them one by one:

Ray Wilson may be the toughest, as he’s mustached in the 1905 photo, but not elsewhere:

Rogelio Valdés

John Patterson

Clarence Williams

Frank Grant, who was apparently fond of non-standard headwear:

Bobby Winston

Johnny Hill (the same mustache problem as Ray Wilson):

John Nelson

Harry Buckner

Walter Ball, José Muñoz, William Jackson,* and Danger Talbert were also on this team, but I don’t think they’re in this photo:

 

(*-I’ve currently got the wrong photo for Jackson up at Seamheads, but that’ll be fixed soon.)

For the unknown player, then, that leaves the X-Giants’ first baseman, Robert Jordan.  I’ve never seen a photo identified as Jordan, so it’s impossible to say now, but based on their roster, it seems likely to be him.

UPDATE 1/19/2013 See also this discussion of the photo.

rube vs. rube, part 3

Here’s another contemporary mention of the Cuban X Giants’ defeat of Rube Waddell and the semipro Murray Hills at New York’s Olympia Field on August 2, 1903—the game that may have been the source of Rube Foster’s nickname.  From the Jersey Journal (August 13, 1903, p. 7):




The relevant sentence is this one:

Typically copy like this, retailing the victories of a traveling team, originated with the traveling team itself, there not being any easy way for reporters (or the manager of the local team) to keep track of black or semipro teams and all their doings. So, eleven days after the August 2 game in New York, it seems quite likely that E. B. Lamar was using the defeat of Waddell to advertise his Cuban X Giants.

a proliferation of rubes

Waddell, Foster, DeGroff

A few months ago I finally found the long-sought game (suspected by some, including me, to be mythical) in which Andrew Foster pitched against, and defeated, Rube Waddell, thus earning the right to be called “Rube” himself.  This contest, with Foster hurling for the Cuban X-Giants and Waddell (under the pseudonym “Wilson”) for Nat Strong’s New York City semipro club, the Murray Hills, took place on August 2, 1903, at New York’s Olympia Field.

The other day John Thorn tipped me off about a sequel to this story (which he wrote about here).  Six weeks after the Murray Hills game, the X-Giants were barnstorming in upstate New York.  On September 21 (as John describes) they met the Kingston Colonials of the Hudson River League and edged them 3 to 2.  Foster was on the mound for the X-Giants. His opponent, the Kingston pitcher, was one Art DeGroff, who went on to a long career as a minor league outfielder and made some appearances in the big leagues with the Cardinals in 1905 and 1906.  “It may be coincidence,” John says, “but by the time [DeGroff] reached Rochester for the 1904 campaign, and forevermore thereafter, he too was known as ‘Rube’.”

So (perhaps) Foster beat Waddell to take the name Rube, then DeGroff came close to beating Foster to gain the nickname himself. Whatever the case with DeGroff, Waddell was the indisputable godfather of Rubes.  Richard Marquard, the third in the trinity of baseball’s most successful Rubes, also supposedly got his nickname because he reminded a minor league sportswriter of Waddell.

rube vs. rube

“It was during this period [the early 1900s] that the nickname ‘Rube’ was attached to the young pitcher.  Legend has it that his teammates began calling him Rube after he defeated George E. (Rube) Waddell and the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-2, in a game in New York.”
    --Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White (1970), p. 107.

“By his own recollection, that’s the year [1902) he met and whipped the great Rube Waddell, who was 25-7 with the pennant-winning Athletics.  Other reports say the Waddell game was in 1903 or 1905.  No box score has yet been found.  However, since there was no Sunday baseball in those years, the Athletics were in the habit of playing exhibitions outside the city every Sunday, and it is not unlikely that they played Rube’s club on one or more of those occasions.”
    --John Holway, Blackball Stars (1988), p. 11.

“As a raw-talent rookie pitcher soon after the turn of the century, the big Texan was credited with 51 victories in 1902, including a win over the great Rube Waddell, the game in which Foster received his nickname.”
    --James Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (1994), p. 290.

“One postseason contest against the Athletics saw Foster go head-to-head against Connie Mack’s star southpaw, Rube Waddell.  Foster won 5-2, and as a consequence, he later recalled, ‘they gave me the name of the colored Rube Waddell’.  News accounts, starting in 1905, first began referring to the Philadelphia Giants’ ace as Rube Foster.”
    --Robert Cottrell, The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant (2001), p. 19.

 

Andrew Foster, it is said, acquired his nickname on the field of battle, defeating Rube Waddell and taking it from him in what sounds like some kind of ancient warrior ritual. As far as I can tell, nobody has identified the actual exhibition game against the Philadelphia Athletics, and accounts vary considerably about the year in which the legendary contest occurred, anywhere from 1902 to 1905.

I haven’t been able to find the game against the A’s either, though I wouldn’t rule it out (see Holway’s comment above).  The earliest example I’ve found of Foster himself telling the story of his nickname appears in an article by Frederick North Shorey in the September 14, 1907, issue of the Indianapolis Freeman.  Shorey quotes Foster saying, in part:

The order of the sentences kind of implies it took place in 1905, though I’d say it’s still more than a little ambiguous.  Phil Dixon doesn’t record any exhibition games between Waddell’s A’s and Foster’s Philadelphia Giants in his thorough account of the Giants’ 1905 season, though there are lots of blank spaces in October, and again, I wouldn’t rule it out. 

But Foster was called “Rube” before 1905.  The earliest example I’ve found so far is from the July 26, 1904, issue of the Trenton Evening Times, in a story about a game between the Philadelphia Giants and the Trenton YMCA:

So perhaps it took place earlier in 1904, or possibly in 1902 or 1903.  In 1902, Foster played for the Chicago Union Giants and a white semipro team in Otsego, Michigan; so far, I haven’t found any indication that either of these teams ever faced Rube Waddell, though my search has hardly been exhaustive.  In 1903 Foster joined the Cuban X Giants on the east coast.  I haven’t found them playing the Philadelphia A’s yet, but there is this, from July 28, 1903:

(New York Evening World, July 28, 1903, p. 8)

The Murray Hills were a fairly prominent Manhattan semipro team managed at the time by Nat Strong.  And the following Sunday (August 2) they did indeed meet the Cuban X Giants at Olympia Field (see below), with Foster on the mound for the Giants, vs. “Wilson” for the Murray Hills.

(New York Sun, August 3, 1903, p. 6)

It happens that Charles Dryden of the Philadelphia North American, one of the most famous baseball writers in the country, wrote up an account of this game.  I haven’t seen the original, but a passage from it was quoted a couple of days later in the Pittsburg Press:

(Pittsburg Press, August 5, 1903, p. 10)

The Philadelphia Athletics were in town to play the Highlanders, but at that time Sunday baseball was illegal in New York, so Waddell spent the enforced day off pitching as “Wilson” for the semipro Murray Hills in an illicit game (although results were still reported in some newspapers) against Andrew Foster of the Cuban X Giants.  Waddell struck out 12 but was dinged for 11 or 12 hits, while Foster scattered 7 hits and won, 6 to 3.  At one point Foster hit Waddell in the head, to the apparent entertainment of the crowd.  Later a foul tip from Waddell supposedly hit a fan and ignited a box of matches in his pocket, setting his clothes on fire.

On the top of that, this game appears to be the only documented instance of Foster pitching against Waddell.  Even though it was against the Murray Hills and not the Athletics, and the score was 6 to 3 and not 5 to 2, it seems to me quite possible that this was the game that led to Foster being forever after known as Rube.

Some closing notes:

• I still think it’s not unlikely that Foster was really called Rube because he was a new arrival in the North from rural Texas, and that the story that it came from his victory over Waddell is a case of retconning.

• You’d think that Nat Strong and the Murray Hills would have wanted it known widely that Waddell was pitching for them that Sunday.  This would be complicated by the blue laws, obviously, and by the fact that Connie Mack would probably have frowned on his star pitcher throwing nine innings on his off day.  So I’m wondering what kind of guerrilla marketing techniques Nat Strong used to evade detection by the authorities but still pull in a good crowd.

• The address given for Olympia Field (135th St. and Lenox Avenue) was only a long block away from the address later commonly given for Olympic Field (136th St. and Fifth Avenue), eventually the home of the New York Lincoln Giants.  I don’t know if they were really the same ballpark, or related in some way.

UPDATE 10/23/2012 Check out more details on Rube Waddell’s crazy 1903 season, my thoughts on the reliability of the Charles Dryden story, and some corroborating (non-Dryden) evidence.

rogelio valdés at bat, atlantic city 1905

Here’s an extreme rarity—an action photo of a game involving a black baseball team, published in a mainstream newspaper in 1905.  It shows Rogelio Valdés of the Cuban X Giants batting against the Atlantic City club at Inlet Park in early July.  Assuming the image hasn’t been reversed, this would mean that Valdés, a right-handed batter according to Jorge Figueredo, actually hit left-handed, or at least switch-hit.

(Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1905, p. 13)

earliest known photo of pete hill?

In honor of the dedication of Pete Hill’s historical marker in Buena, Virginia, here’s a photo of the 1904 Philadelphia Giants I ran across recently.  It was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on September 2, 1904, on the occasion of Rube Foster’s great victory over the Cuban X-Giants in the three-game series they played for the “Colored Championship of the World.”  (Foster’s 18 strikeouts, by the way, could be considered the all-time “Negro league” record, beating Satchel Paige’s 17 strikeouts against the Cuban Stars on April 29, 1929, though I suppose it depends on how you define “Negro league record.”)

The evidence suggests that 1904 was Pete Hill’s first full season in big-time black baseball (he had played for the Cuban X-Giants in Havana the previous fall), so this could be the earliest photo of Pete that we have.  Pete is in the middle row, second from left.

(Apologies again for the poor quality of this microfilmed-then-scanned image; I’m sure, or at least I hope, that actual prints of this picture exist somewhere.  I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen one, though.)

There’s another photo of the Philadelphia Giants floating around that’s commonly dated to 1904.  It can’t be, though, as Grant Johnson (top row, far left—the only player not identified in the handwriting on the photo) did not join the Giants until 1905—he was with the Cuban X-Giants in 1904.  In fact, Johnson only played for the Philadelphia Giants in 1905 (and for a short time in Cuba in the fall of 1907), so this photo certainly dates from 1905 rather than 1904.

UPDATE 6/16/2011  Here is a much better image of the 1904 photo.

black ballplayers in 1900

Check out these charts prepared by the sociology students of W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University for the “American Negro” exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition:

I’m not sure under what category professional ballplayer would be listed (not the “professions,” which I think would mean mostly medicine, law, education, and the pulpit).  Most likely there weren’t any black professional ballplayers in Georgia at the turn of the century.  There weren’t that many in the county at large, at best a few dozen, probably—though there would have been many, many semi-professional or amateur players, of course.

In the 1900 U.S. Census, I’ve located a total of nine.  I wouldn’t claim that this is anything like a comprehensive accounting, since my research mostly focuses on later eras, and it’s not actually that easy to search my notes for exactly this information.  But here are the black men I’ve found in the 1900 census whose occupation is listed as ballplayer:

Sherman Barton (listed as a “Base Ballist,” a phrase that would have sounded antique even in 1900)
John Bingey (sic; could be the same as William Binga)
Harry Buckner
Peter Burns, a key figure in the Tokohama affair
Charles Grant, “Tokohama” himself
William Holland
Grant Johnson
John Patterson
Solomon White

For whatever reason, all lived in Chicago as of June, 1900, when the census was enumerated, except for Barton, who lived in Normal, Illinois, and Johnson, who appeared in his hometown, Findlay, Ohio.  All played for the Columbia Giants or Chicago Unions around this time.

Occupations of Charles Grant and Solomon White as listed in the 1900 U.S. Census.

Walter Ball can be found living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he was playing professional ball, but in the census he is listed as a “R. R. Porter.”  A couple of guys who might be Bill Monroe can be found in Chicago, but aren’t listed as ballplayers.  The 17-year-old Pete Hill, who by some accounts started playing professionally in 1899, is listed as a “day laborer” in Pittsburgh.  Many others who were definitely professionals at the time, especially in the East, can’t be found for certain in the census, including nearly the whole roster of the Cuban X Giants (Frank Grant, Clarence Williams, etc.).  It seems likely that the Cubans were on the road and were missed by the census takers.

Going beyond the census, I’ve found one official document that lists a black man’s occupation as ballplayer in 1900: the death certificate of Andrew Jackson, who had been for several years the third baseman and captain of the Cuban X Giants.  Jackson, who had led his team on a Cuban tour a few months earlier, died of heart failure at the age of 34 in New York City on May 15, 1900.  (Apologies for the poor quality of the image.)

In the sideways portion of the form at the bottom we are given Jackson’s profession:

I have to say I know virtually nothing about Andrew Jackson, or for that matter about the Cuban X Giants, which seem to be one of the least written about great teams in African-American baseball history.

stoney mcglynn vs. cuban X giants, 1902

Looking for something else entirely I ran across this account of a 1902 game between the Cuban X Giants and the local team in Chester, Pennsylvania.  On the mound for Chester was Stoney McGlynn, a minor league superstar and sometime St. Louis Cardinal who is supposed to have been a distant relative of mine.  Although the game was close, the X Giants smashed four home runs off poor Stoney in their 5-to-3 win, three of the long balls coming from the bat of the almost completely unknown Ed Wilson.

You should be able to enlarge the story by clicking on it; be sure to read the notes on the game in the far right column.

1900 cuban X giants in cuba

Paul Wendt has found two box scores for the 1900 Cuban X Giants’ trip to Cuba, printed in (of all places) the Chicago Tribune.  This is the first time I’ve seen any boxes for that series; even Severo Nieto didn’t find any.

(Chicago Tribune, February 28, 1900)

(Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1900)

Given that someone was sending box scores to the U.S. (likely the team’s organizer, Edward B. Lamar, who also put together the 1920/21 Bacharach Giants’ trip to Cuba), it’s entirely possible they turned up in other newspapers.  I haven’t been able to find any in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times; but if anybody is doing research on the early months of 1900, you might keep your eyes peeled for any mentions of the X Giants in Cuba.

UPDATE 11:24 p.m. Paul has also established that the X Giants’ Grant is probably not Charlie Grant, who played for the Columbia Giants of Chicago at that time, but rather the veteran Frank Grant, who was based in New York.