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bill thompson, the twin state league, and “organized baseball”

Twelve years after Hippo Galloway played five games for the Woodstock Bains of the Canadian League, an African American catcher named Bill Thompson spent most of the 1911 season with the Bellows Falls, Vermont, club of the Twin State League.  Was Thompson, and not Galloway, the last player before Jackie Robinson to appear openly as a black man in Organized Baseball?

Let’s give Thompson himself a little attention first. Seamus Kearney wrote a great article about him in The National Pastime back in 1996 (p. 67).  In addition here’s a piece that was published in several newspapers in 1910, about Thompson signing for George “Andy” Lawson’s outlaw United States League (which, as far as I know, never got off the ground).  It gives a few additional details about Thompson’s career.

(Boston Herald, January 17, 1910, p. 5)

I don’t have anything like a satisfactory account of how much and when Thompson played for the Cuban Giants and Philadelphia Giants, but “William Thompson, Cuban Giants” was reported to be joining what was evidently an otherwise all-white independent club in Concord in 1908 (Nashua Telegraph, March 17, 1908).

Thompson couldn’t be found in the 1900 census for sure, but a 31-year-old black man named “William T. Thompson” appears in the 1910 census in Concord, New Hampshire.  He was employed by a “pool room,” a fairly common off-season job for ballplayers, and lived with his mother Kate E. Thompson and his wife Margaret J. Thompson.  I was also able to find a World War I draft card for William Penn Thompson, “Negro,” born January 14, 1874 (it was not uncommon for registrants to add a few years to their age during World War I), working as a “shoe-cutter,” and living in Concord, New Hampshire with his wife Margaret.

Anyway, as Kearney describes in The National Pastime, Thompson signed with the Bellows Falls, Vermont, team in the new Twin State League (the twin states being Vermont and New Hampshire).  He was generally popular, and hit well before suffering a season-ending injury in August.  There was no doubt that he was known to be black; newspapers in the league’s towns referred to him as “dusky Thompson” and recalled his past as a Cuban Giant.

So was the Twin State League a part of Organized Baseball?  The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball says yes, it was Class D; and according to Kearney, Vermont baseball historian Merritt Clifton also concludes that the league was party to the National Agreement.

Certainly, after 1911 it was an independent league, according to contemporary sources—there seems to be little dispute about this.  I haven’t found a clear statement about the league’s 1911 status in any newspaper accounts at the time. But it’s worth noting the Twin State League is not on this list of member leagues of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Leagues for 1911, published in the 1912 Spalding’s Official Base Ball Record:



At the moment, my sense of the matter is probably best conveyed by this passage from Peter Morris’s book Catcher: The Evolution of an American Folk Hero:

“An African-American catcher named Bill Thompson spent the entire season in the Twin State League in 1911 without encountering problems.  While the Twin State League had not signed the National Agreement that would have made it a part of organized baseball, the circuit did maintain a good working relationship with the leagues that had signed, making the lack of controversy over Thompson’s presence noteworthy.  Two years later another team in the same league tried to use an African-American pitcher, only to be met with their opponent’s refusal to take the field.” (p. 272)

That pitcher was Frank Wickware, and he was actually supposed to pitch for Bellows Falls, the same team that Bill Thompson had played for.  The team that forfeited the game rather than face him was the Northampton Larks. As Morris points out, here is a clear instance of the color line being drawn—in the Twin State League between 1911 and 1913, between Bill Thompson and Frank Wickware.  Even if he wasn’t strictly speaking part of Organized Baseball, Thompson’s tenure with Bellows Falls remains a milestone, if only for this reason.

 

(Springfield Union, August 27, 1913, p. 12)

frank wickware, hot springs 1916

Here’s an extraordinary photograph from the collection of Brian Campf, showing Frank Wickware in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1916, chatting with three ladies, including Constance Hoblitzell (in the middle, wearing sunglasses), the wife of major league first basemen Dick Hoblitzell.  According to Brian, writing on the back of the photograph refers to Wickware as “the Negro Walter Johnson,” probably in reference to Wickware’s defeat of Johnson at Schenectady in 1913.

Photos of Frank Wickware are relatively unusual, and most don’t give an especially clear image of him.  Here’s this one compared to a couple of the best ones I’ve seen (L to R, 1916, 1918, 1913):

jim eschen, 1913 all-americans

Jack Morris writes about the Frank Wickware/Walter Johnson contest in 1913:

“I think the Eshen listed in the boxscore for the All-Americans is Jim Eschen, who would eventually play 10 games for the 1915 Cleveland Indians. He was an up-and-coming player in 1913. The Yankees had signed him and sent him to Jersey City in the International League where he mostly played left field. 1913 was his rookie year in Organized Baseball. According to the December 20, 1913 Sporting Life, he was going to go to camp with the Yankees in Houston for the spring of 1914.”

Also: see Phil Dixon’s book The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History, page 68, for another team photograph of the Schenectady Mohawk Giants, this time without the plaid jackets so you can see what their uniforms looked like.

red ant, big train

If you remember anything about Frank Wickware and his 1913 team the Schenectady Mohawk Giants it’s likely to be Wickware’s 1 to 0 defeat of Walter Johnson in an exhibition game on October 5 of that year.  This was Walter Johnson at the height of his powers, the year he went 36-7 for the Washington Senators with a 1.14 ERA.  Both Wickware and Johnson were born only a few months apart (Johnson on November 6. 1887, Wickware on March 18, 1888) in the southeast corner of Kansas; both were often linked to Coffeyville, though Johnson was born and grew up outside of Humboldt, while it appears that Wickware was from Girard, though he may later have moved to Coffeyville.

   
    
Walter Johnson and Frank Wickware.  Note that Wickware is called “Smoky Joe” Wickware by the Schenectady Gazette in 1913, several years before the nickname was attached to Cyclone Joe Williams (who, incidentally, started the year with the Mohawks).

The game only went five innings (45 minutes!), perhaps by prior agreement with Johnson, who had just thrown 346 innings in 48 games for the Nationals.  (The Schenectady Gazette said it was called due to darkness.)  His team had been advertised as consisting of American League players (thus, presumably, the moniker “All-Americans”), but I’ve had a hard time tracking them down.  The only ones I know for sure are Fred Jacklitsch, a 38-year-old former Phillies catcher, playing for Rochester of the International League that year, and Paul Dietz, shortstop for Harrisburg of the Tri-State League and later a fixture on the East Coast semipro scene.  It seems safe to say that Johnson was backed by a minor league team—and not a high-level minor league team, either.

Yet Johnson hardly needed them.  He struck out 11 in five innings.  Of his  62 pitches, only nine were called balls, and the All-Americans did not manage a single assist. The Mohawks made only two hits, both ground rule doubles that went over the crowds standing in the outfield, one to left, one to center.  (You have to wonder just how close the fans were standing.)

Wickware, by contrast, was pretty good, but not overpowering.  He fanned five but walked three, allowed five hits (including two to Johnson), and hit a batter.  Still, he succeed in working his way out of trouble, and scraped through with the five-inning win.

Here’s the Schenectady Gazette’s account of the game (October 6, 1913; click to enlarge).