Agate Type

grant johnson

I know about the Buck O’Neil and Minnie Miñoso controversies, but for my money the biggest omission in the 2006 election of Negro leaguers to the Hall of Fame was Grant “Home Run” Johnson—the best African American ballplayer of the 1890s and early 1900s, the biggest star in black baseball before Rube Foster (and probably co-equal with Rube for a few years in the 1900s), organizer and manager of great teams from the Page Fence Giants to the Cuban League champion Habana B.B.C. in the 1911/12 winter season, and still one of the best hitters in black baseball in his late thirties and early forties.

I’m happy to report that, through the efforts of Howard Henry and Jeremy Krock, Johnson will be getting a marker for his grave at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York.  As part of this effort I recently supplied Howard with some photos of Johnson, so, for no particular reason, here are a few:

Grant Johnson with the 1894 Findlay Sluggers, an integrated team that also featured Bud Fowler.

The 1896 Page Fence Giants, with Johnson standing second from right.

 

Johnson from a photo of the 1904 Cuban X Giants.

 

Photos of Pete Hill and Grant Johnson from the Philadelphia Inquirer (April 23, 1905), one of several items on the same page promoting the Philadelphia Giants.  This image of Johnson would later be reprinted in Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball (1907).

The 1905 Philadelphia Giants, with Johnson standing at far left, next to Rube Foster (for some reason his name is not written on the photo like the other players).

A photo of Johnson published in the Brooklyn Standard Union, October 18, 1905.

 

The 1906 Brooklyn Royal Giants, with Johnson standing third from left.

 

Several players from the 1911/12 Habana Base Ball Club of the Cuban National League, from the 1911 Spalding Baseball Guide, Spanish American Edition.

 

Grant Johnson dressed to the nines, date unknown.

 

habana’s american players, 1911

On November 19, 1911, six African American baseball players arrived in Havana, Cuba, to play for the newly re-organized Habana Base Ball Club.  They posed for this photograph, printed in the Havana newspaper El Mundo on November 20, 1911.

Standing, L to R: Pete Hill, John Henry Lloyd, Grant “Home Run” Johnson, Walter Ball
Seated: Bruce Petway, Cyclone Joe Williams, Bill Pettus.

Although the quality of the image above is quite poor (having been printed, microfilmed, and finally scanned), if anyone ever comes up with an actual print of this photograph, it might turn out to be quite valuable.  You’re looking at a previously unknown (or little-known) image that includes three Hall of Famers plus three other very notable Negro league players.

Of the six players, five actually appeared for Habana during the 1911-12 winter season; the sixth, Walter Ball, returned to the United States on January 16, 1912, not having pitched an inning, as far as I can tell.  Here he is, on the passenger list of the S.S. Chalmette, bound for New Orleans:

shadowball

Phil Bradley and Grant Johnson of the 1920 Pittsburgh Stars of Buffalo

In October 1920, with the World Series between the Dodgers and Indians looming, and nobody having thought to invent television in time, the Pittsburgh Stars of Buffalo, a black professional team led by should-be Hall of Famer Grant “Home Run” Johnson, got together with their local arch-rivals, a semipro team called the Polish Nationals, to concoct a rather strange spectacle:

(Buffalo Express, October 1, 1920, p. 14)

PERFECTED SIGNAL SYSTEM
•••
Colored Stars and Polish Nationals to impersonate pennant winners.
•••

    With Pittsburgh Colored Stars and Polish Nationals next Tuesday impersonating Brooklyn and Cleveland in the world’s series opening game, both Grant Johnson and Manager [Ray] Fischer [of the Polish Nationals] last night perfected the signal system which will be used to impart to the players on the field knowledge of the world’s series plays as they come over the telegraph wires, and both local leaders are convinced that actual world’s series duplication can be run off on the Ferry street ball park without a hitch, in other words, that the player impersonating Tris Speaker will triple if Speaker triples and that Sikorski and Hoffman will strike out Phil Bradley if Bradley happens to be impersonating a Brooklynite who has just fanned in the real series.
    Jack Singer will umpire.  Play will start at 3 o’clock in Brooklyn, and if on time there will start on time here.

grant johnson at bat, 1910?

Here’s a cool photo sequence from the Detroit Free Press (November 17, 1910) showing scenes from the Detroit Tigers’ fall 1910 trip to Havana.

(click to enlarge)

Especially interesting is the leftmost photo, which purports to show Grant “Home Run” Johnson batting left-handed.  All sources I know about say he was a right-handed hitter, and all photos I’ve seen show him as such—though I don’t know of any in-game photos showing him actually at bat.  This photo has definitely not been inadvertently reversed, as Oscar Stanage was of course a right-handed catcher, and his glove is shown here on his left hand.  Unfortunately the printing-microfilming-digitizing sequence has so degraded the quality of what might have not been a very sharp photo in the first place that there’s no way to tell whether this is really Johnson, or maybe someone else on the Habana team, say Pete Hill or Carlos Morán, both left-handed hitters.

For what it’s worth, here are early photos of Hill and Johnson posing with bats (from the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 1905).  The photo of Johnson would later be reprinted in Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball—I don’t think I’ve seen the photo of Hill elsewhere.

I don’t think I have seen a photo of Carlos Morán batting, but here’s Pete Hill, actually at bat in a game for the Leland Giants vs. the Cuban Stars, probably in late June, 1909.