Agate Type

Cobb & Redding, 1916

I’ve been asked recently (see this comment) whether Ty Cobb ever faced Cannonball Dick Redding. In a 1932 interview with the Chicago Defender (posted here by Ryan Whirty) Redding himself said (or at least implied) that he had played against Cobb in Cuba. Many of the claims in that article are maybe a bit exaggerated, and some are simply false—this one is in the latter category. Ty Cobb only played baseball in Cuba once, in 1910. Redding came to Cuba several times, beginning in the 1911/12 winter season, and he never faced the Detroit Tigers or Cobb there.

In fact, according to many sources, after the 1910 series in Havana, Cobb vowed never to play against black players again. I’ve so far been unable to figure out where this story originated. In any case Charles Alexander affirms that Cobb never did face black players again in his career, and I’ve never seen anyone suggest otherwise.

So no, there’s no known instance of Cobb facing off against Redding in a game. However—John Holway wrote that Cobb once “refused to hit against [Redding] in batting practice,” but gave no specifics. I have found a just such an incident, though not in batting practice.

In the 1910s George Weiss, future Yankees (and much later, Mets) president and Hall of Famer, ran the New Haven Colonials, an independent team that often outdrew the city’s minor league club. In 1916 he hired Ty Cobb to play in five games (as a first baseman) after the regular season was over. As it happened, the town team in Putnam, Connecticut, brought in Dick Redding to pitch during the October barnstorming season in both 1915 and 1916. On Sunday, October 8, 1916, the Putnams played host to the Colonials. Cobb was the headliner obviously, but both Redding and Jimmy Clinton, a white semipro star (there’s a chapter on him in Scott Simkus’s wonderful book Outsider Baseball), were given secondary billing as Putnam’s answers to Cobb.

(Hartford Courant, October 7, 1916, p. 19)

 

(Norwich Bulletin, October 6, 1916, p. 9)

Putnam won the game 1-0, as Redding threw four innings in relief and doubled to help score the game’s only run. He struck out the first seven batters he faced—but Cobb had already left the game. After delaying the contest for an hour while negotiating his fee, Cobb “by previous agreement stopped playing when it was half over when Cannonball Redding the great colored pitcher went in to work for Putnam.” Cobb didn’t play especially well, and the Norwich Bulletin reported that Redding “was given a great ovation by the crowd to whom he proved much more of an attraction than the high salaried Cobb.”

(Norwich Bulletin, October 9, 1916, p. 3)

This was pretty unusual. In fact, I can’t think of another instance of a predetermined agreement for a player to leave a game due to the entrance of another player.

A couple of years later the Bulletin printed an anecdote about Pat Cawley, the Colonials’ manager, who had to put himself in to hit for Cobb against Redding. The article attributes the arrangement for Cobb to exit the game directly to Cobb’s “southern prejudices”:

(Norwich Bulletin, October 22, 1918, p. 3)

(I’m not the first person to notice this incident: Howard W. Rosenberg wrote about it in Ty Cobb Unleashed, though I haven’t read the book.)

the death of dick redding

Ryan Whirty has been looking into the deaths of Dick Redding and Sol White, both of whom passed away in mental hospitals on Long Island, within a few years of each other. For some time researchers of Dick Redding have been stymied by the New York State Department of Health’s practice of redacting the cause of death from death certificates. A few months ago I requested a copy of Redding’s death certificate, just to see what would happen. The other day I finally received it. To my surprise, nothing was redacted—the cause of death was there to see, though some details were illegible.

I sent it to Ryan, who wrote it up.

a grave marker for sol white

I was interviewed by Ryan Whirty for an article in the Staten Island Advance on the upcoming placement of a marker on the grave of Sol White in Frederick Douglass Memorial Park. It will happen on May 10, thanks to Jeremy Krock and the Negro League Grave Marker Project as well as the Friends of Frederick Douglass Memorial Park.

Ryan, by the way, is looking into White’s final years, his commitment to the Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island and his death there in 1955 (and also the 1948 death of Cannonball Dick Redding at the nearby Pilgrim State Hospital).

the first negro league no-hitter

Here’s what appears to be, for now, the earliest known Negro league no-hitter (that is, a no-hitter in a game between top-flight black professional teams in the U.S.), preceding Frank Wickware’s 1914 gem by two years.

(New York Press, August 29, 1912, p. 7)

This was one classic game—Dick Redding in a no-hit, 1-0 victory over José Méndez, at that point the most accomplished and most famous pitcher outside the major leagues.  I’d love to find an actual box score.

Apparently Bill Holland claimed that Redding threw some 30 no-hitters in his career, but I can’t recall anyone, player or historian, mentioning this one—versus the Cuban Stars in 1912—in particular.  There is this article, which says he went 43-12 in 1912 with seven no-hitters, including a perfect game.  I couldn’t find seven, but I did come up with one more no-hitter, the one mentioned briefly in the story above—and it was in fact a perfect game:

(New York Press, August 5, 1912, p. 7)