Agate Type

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.

millito

Today is the 105th birthday of Emilio Navarro, “Millito,” who played shortstop for Pompez’s Cuban Stars in the late 1920s.  This article and other sources say he’s the last known living veteran of the Negro American League.  This, of course, is wrong, as Navarro never played in the NAL, which was founded in 1937 in the Midwest and lasted until 1960.  There are probably dozens of NAL alums still alive today.

I think what is meant is the “American Negro League,” which operated for one season as the eastern Negro league in 1929.  Navarro first played in the continental U.S. the previous season in 1928, and so the question arises as to whether he is the last man left alive who played in the ANL’s better-known predecessor, the Eastern Colored League, which fell apart during the 1928 season.  As far as I can tell Navarro didn’t actually appear for the Cuban Stars while they were still members of the ECL.  Pompez’s club, along with the Lincoln Giants, announced their withdrawal from the league on Friday, June 1, whereas Navarro’s first appearance with the Cubans was on June 18.  Of course, Navarro appeared in a number of games against various former ECL teams later in 1928, but the league itself didn’t exist anymore.

Which leaves open the question of who the last veteran of the ECL was.  My best guess now is Si Simmons, who pitched for the Lincoln Giants in the mid-1920s, and died in 2006 at the age of 109 (1900 census) or 111 (draft cards).  On the other hand, Simmons was already 30 years old when he appeared in the ECL in 1926; probably more than half the league was younger than he was, including a number of guys in their late teens or early twenties.  Considering the number of players who’ve never been fully identified, I think it’s just barely possible that an ECL veteran may still be hanging on somewhere.

(Incidentally, some sources indicate that Simmons appeared in one game as Navarro’s teammate on the 1929 Cubans, making him also one of the last veterans of the ANL.)