Agate Type

the santop montage

Hake’s has put up for auction a rather amazing piece from the Richard Merkin collection.  It’s astonishing, a one of a kind artifact: a montage of numerous photos of Negro league players from the 1910s, many of them images I’ve never seen before, including some fairly obscure players.  It’s dominated by pictures of Louis Santop (14 individual images in all, not counting the team photos). 

The montage’s history seems completely unknown; Hake’s speculates that it was perhaps made for Santop himself.  At the top and bottom are a number of team photos; the center is filled with photos of individual players, many from Palm Beach, Florida, winter baseball in the mid-1910s.  There are also a number of players in Indianapolis ABCs uniforms, which might also be from one of the team’s sojourns in Florida.

Here are some of the highlights (for me, anyway).

Lee Wade with mascot; Ashby Dunbar.

Bill Pettus.

The “Female Giants,” Florida 1913.  The players are wearing both Royal Poinciana and Brooklyn (Royal Giants?) jerseys.

Some of the Santop images.

1911 St. Louis Giants. 

It’s hard to tell, but I think  the two guys seated in the front might be Eugene Moore (on the left) and Joe Hewitt (on the right); Steel Arm Johnny Taylor might be seated in the middle, second from left; and Ben Taylor might be standing, second from left.

 

Leroy Grant, Louis Santop, Joe Hewitt, John Henry Lloyd; bottom left is catcher Burlin White; bottom center Bill Gatewood pitching.

I would love to see a large, high-resolution image of this montage printed on a fold-out sheet in a coffee-table book.  Come to think of it, I’d like to see a well-designed Negro league coffee table book, period.  There are a number of smaller books of photos, particularly the fine Black Baseball in… series, with volumes on Kansas City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.  But possibly the only publication that really qualifies as a Negro league coffee-table book would be Phil Dixon’s The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History—and that is, I believe, out of print. There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of great images that are scattered around in other books, on the internet, and in collections.

UPDATE 5:04 p.m. I should also mention Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball, by Mark Rucker and Peter Bjarkman, which is another of my favorite books of photographs.

negro leagues DB update: florida hotel league, cuban league, 1899-1900 negro leagues

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

We've just added the following to the DB: the 1916/17 Cuban Winter League, the 1917 and 1918 Florida Hotel League, and a handful of games from the 1899 and 1900 seasons, as well as new games for 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, and 1912.

In 1899 the Cuban X Giants came west to play the two Chicago clubs, the Unions (which had existed since the 1880s) and the Columbia Giants, formerly the Page Fence Giants of Adrian, Michigan, which had moved to Chicago under the auspices of the Columbia Club, a local social organization. In addition, 1899 saw Abel Linares organize the first tour of Cuban professionals in the United States. The All-Cubans played a pair of grudge matches against the Cuban X Giants in Hoboken, ostensibly motivated by the (real) Cubans' desire to uphold the honor of their national name.

The following season saw both the Cuban X Giants and the Genuine Cuban Giants come west. That season the American League's new Chicago White Sox built a new park on the South Side at the corner of 39th and Wentworth. Unfortunately this was across the street from the Columbia Giants' park (the former Daly Park, home of the white semipro Daly Baseball Club), and just a couple of blocks away from the Unions' home grounds, at 37th and Butler. Eventually the major leaguers would drive both black teams out of the neighborhood, although the Columbias did use the White Sox park as their home field in 1902. (It would later, as Schorling Park, become the home field for the Chicago American Giants for many years.)

William "Hippo" Galloway, of the 1900 Cuban X Giants, had become in 1899 simultaneously the last black player to appear openly in organized baseball in North America (with the Woodstock club of the Canadian League) and the first black player to appear in a hockey league (with Woodstock in the Central Ontario Hockey Association).

Jumping forward a few years, in the winter of 1916/17 Cuban baseball saw yet another group of organizers put together a new circuit, which they called the Cuban-American League, despite the complete absence of American players. The old Almendares Park had been torn down, and the games were played in Marianao's Oriental Park, which was actually a horse racing venue.

Oriental Park, 1921

The Almendares players were reassembled under the name "Orientals" (or Orientales), while Habana reappeared as the "Red Sox" (Medias Rojas). The traditional third Havana team, Fe, no longer existed, and the previous season's attempt to replace them with a team called San Francisco Park had ended in abject failure. So this year Tinti Molina and Abel Linares simply decided to enter their barnstorming Cuban Stars as the third team, under the name "White Sox" (Medias Blancas).

It took so long to organize everything that the league did not get underway until February 1917, and lasted only 15 games. Dolf Luque pitched and hit well for the Orientals (1.84 ERA, .355 average), and his team did just enough to take the pennant with an 8-6 record.

At exactly the same time as the brief Cuban-American League season, Palm Beach hosted the annual series between teams representing the Royal Poinciana Hotel (managed this year by Rube Foster) and the Breakers Hotel (managed by Joe Williams). The Cuban-American lefty Juan Padrón had been slated to join the Cuban Stars / White Sox in Cuba, but instead he turned up here, pitching for Foster. He started against Joe Williams four times, winning three with one tie. Overall he went 5-2 with three shutouts and an 0.61 ERA, providing just enough for the Poincianas to edge the Breakers 7 games to 6. The winter of 1917/18 saw no formal league organized in Cuba, but the Palm Beach series continued. Juan Padrón switched sides, but managed only a single win this time. Meanwhile Dick Whitworth went 5-0, 1.07, for the Poincianas. That was enough for Foster's team to win 9 out of 14 games.

Coming up for the DB: the 1933 Negro league season, the East-West All-Star Games, the Mexican League, more Cuban seasons, and a lot more.

 

Bill Galloway, Juan Padrón, Dick Whitworth