Agate Type

overestimating the fog: bullet rogan and joe williams

Joe Posnanski has a great series (currently on hiatus) listing his version of the 100  greatest players in baseball history, a list that (as you might expect) includes several Negro leaguers. I’ve enjoyed these pieces quite a bit. But I wanted to respond to a few statements Pos makes (in passing) in a couple of the Negro league entries—not to be a jerk (or at least I hope it doesn’t come off like that), but to emphasize a few things about the Negro leagues that I think aren’t too well-known, even to initiates.

In his entry on Bullet Rogan, Posnanski writes that Rogan “played the bulk of his professional career in the 1920s, before there was even moderate coverage of the Negro Leagues…”

You hear this, or something like it, a lot. I guess the assumption is that everything improves through time, that the farther back in history you go the worse the records are, that the Negro leagues got better and better known through the years, and that the era of Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard and Monte Irvin in the 1940s must be the best-documented part of black baseball history.

In fact, though, the 1920s were, by far, the most intensively covered era in Negro league history. True, nearly all the substantive writing about them was published in the black press. But there was quite a bit of it, at least compared to other eras, with several nationally-distributed newspapers (the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American) along with a number of more regional or local papers (New York Age, Kansas City Call, Philadelphia Tribune, etc.) devoting multiple pages per weekly issue to sports, which during the summer basically meant professional baseball. There were a number of columnists who dealt solely or mostly with black baseball. The Defender and Courier both tried to act as news clearing houses, so to speak, for the Negro leagues, printing coverage and box scores for both the major black leagues and the major independent clubs.

And beyond the black press, the mainstream (white) daily papers in most league cities regularly published box scores for Negro league games—which leads me to this passage, a little later in the Rogan essay: after quoting some of Rogan’s season statistics from Shades of Glory, Posnanski remarks, “But the numbers are foggy. Everything from the Negro Leagues in that time, sadly, is foggy.”

On the contrary: the 1920s is also the best-documented decade of pre-integration black baseball history in terms of box scores and statistics derived from them, by a long shot. For example: we have box scores for 78 out of 79 Monarchs games against NNL opponents in 1920; 100 out of 101 in 1921; 84 out of 85 in 1922; 98 out of 98 in 1923; 85 out of 89 in 1924 (including the World Series); and 76 out of 80 in 1928. That’s a total of 521 out of 532 games in those six seasons, or 98 percent. The numbers we’ve got for Rogan in those years are pretty good, quality-wise. And there is every reason to believe that the remaining seasons from the 1920s—1925-27, 1929—are quite similar, as far as coverage goes.

Moreover, the box scores from the 1920s are, generally speaking, more carefully compiled and complete than the box scores of any other decade.

So, at least in terms of NNL games, the numbers from the 1920s are anything but “foggy.” Compared to the major leagues, yes, they are a little fuzzy, but only a little. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the amount of coverage in the black press started to slip, and that both daily and black weekly papers started cutting down on the number of Negro league box scores they printed.

In the entry on Joe Williams, Posnanski writes that “Smokey Joe Williams or Cyclone Joe Williams — he was called both — was born at some point between 1874 and 1885, the exactly year remains hopelessly lost.”

In fact, Williams was born on April 6 in either 1885, 1886, or 1887, in or near Seguin, Texas. Both his World War I and World War II draft cards (signed by Williams) have April 6, 1886. Williams’s entry in the 1900 U.S. census says April 1886. According to John Holway, Williams’s marriage license says April 6, 1885, though later on the same page he says it reads April 6, 1886. He also reports that Williams’s death certificate puts his birth date as April 6, 1887. We don’t have a certain birth record (and it wouldn’t be surprising if one was not made), but all evidence points to a birth date between 1885 and 1887.

Posnanski continues, writing of Williams’s career, that “[t]here is no earned run average to judge — nobody was keeping track of errors — so run average is used.”

Actually, everybody was keeping track of errors during the career of Joe Williams. Nearly every baseball box score printed in those days included errors. They did not keep track of earned runs, at least not for Negro league games—though these can be figured using game accounts, or estimated using errors and passed balls recorded in box scores.

And finally, from the nitpicking files: Posnanski writes that “…stories of the way [Williams] would unwind that body and unleash his fastball still spark the imagination. People would say it was like facing a Cyclone — which is how Williams got his second nickname, Cyclone Joe Williams.”

Okay, okay, this is just a hobby horse of mine. But I can’t resist. “Cyclone” was Wiliams’s first and primary nickname. “Smokey Joe” didn’t appear until the late 1910s, and didn’t become prevalent until the mid-1920s, when Williams moved to the Homestead Grays, and the Pittsburgh Courier undertook a concerted PR campaign to associate him with Pittsburgh, the “Smoky City.”

Anyway, none of this is to detract from Posnanski’s writing. I just wanted to make the point that even some of the most sympathetic and best-informed accounts of the Negro leagues sometimes traffic in exaggerated notions of the fogginess and unknowability of black baseball history, despite the availability of meticulous and well-documented research. We can do better than that.

NOTE: For those who don’t recognize it, the title of this post is a reference to this article by Bill James.

the *other* negro league you’ve never heard of: the international league of colored baseball clubs of america and cuba, 1909

You might have noticed that the latest update to the Seamheads Negro Leagues DB divides 1909 into “Western Independent Clubs” and something called the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs of America and Cuba.” What was that, and did it have anything to do with the (almost identically-named) National Association of Colored Baseball Clubs of the United States and Cuba of 1907 and 1908?

First, let’s lay out the evidence. In this post I cited newspaper articles referring to the National Association that were published on October 29, 1906; March 21, 1908; December 19, 1908; and December 18, 1909. (These, of course, aren’t the only articles that refer to the league by name—this is just a sampling to establish that there are contemporary sources giving the “National Association” name in reference to 1907, 1908, and 1909.) Moreover, Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, originally published in spring 1907, mentioned the National Association by name several times.

So the National Association, by that name, existed from 1907 to 1909, with four teams every year: Brooklyn Royal Giants, Cuban Giants, Cuban Stars, and Philadelphia Giants.

However, here are a few more pieces of evidence:

•In an update to Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide that covered the 1907 season, White referred to the “International League of Colored Base Ball Teams,” which oversaw a “colored championship” contest between the Philadelphia Giants, Cuban Giants, Royal Giants, and Cuban Stars—the same four teams that were in the National Association that year, according to newspaper sources.

• Throughout 1909 and 1910, Lester A. Walton of the New York Age kept talking about the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs of America and Cuba,” again a league featuring the same four times and same key personnel (Nat Strong, Sol White, H. Walter Schlichter, etc.). There are several examples of Walton using this name—it’s the only black league he refers to.

• And even Nat Strong’s December 18, 1909, letter to the Indianapolis Freeman (posted here), in which Strong identifies himself as business manager of the National Association, claimed that the Royal Giants were playing the Cuban Stars for the “International Colored Championship” (his caps; he sent another letter confirming that the Royals had won it).

So, what’s the deal here? Are these two different leagues? If so, why do they have seemingly the same membership? Did the National Association change its name to the International League at some point?

Lawrence D. Hogan, in Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball, spends several pages on the history of these years, and comes up with a rather complicated solution to the National Association / International League conundrum.

First, Hogan asserts that “William Freihoffer [sic] and John O’Rourke” founded the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs in America and Cuba” in 1906 (p. 104). He also apparently believes the 1906 International League to be continuous with the later mentions of an International League from 1907 through 1910 (as listed above).

He then writes that the “ILBCAC” (his acronym for the International League)  “was joined by the National Association of Colored Baseball Clubs of the United States and Cuba (NACBC)” in late 1906. Then at some point the International League “was absorbed into the NACBC, since the same clubs that made up the ILBCAC were also in NACBC members. League clubs played in the ILBCAC in the East, while they functioned under the umbrella of the NACBC during their barnstorming tours in the Midwest and Cuba” (p. 117). In other words, they were originally two separate leagues, but then they merged, with the International League as the name for the  pennant competition and the National Association the name of the Strong-run booking agency.

Hogan’s first point, I can say, is actually a mistake. The Freihofer/O’Rourke league, discussed here, was called the International League of Independent Professional Base Ball Clubs. The term “colored” was never used in its name. Moreover, it included two white semipro teams. In my opinion, a white American team in the U.S. in 1906 would have been extremely unlikely to join an organization that identified itself as “colored.” As far as I can tell, the Freihofer/O’Rourke league ceased to exist after the 1906 season. It had nothing to do with either the National Association (which was reported as a new league when it was founded) or the “International League of Colored Baseball Clubs of America and Cuba” that Lester Walton wrote about in 1909.

As for his argument about the relationship between the National Association and the later International League: I have to say that it goes way beyond any actual evidence I’ve seen. In my opinion, the likeliest explanation for the seeming appearance of two simultaneous leagues with the same roster of teams is the simplest: the International League and the National Association were in fact the same organization. People were just confused about its name.

In part I think this was because they remembered the previous International League, the Freihofer/O’Rourke multicultural league of 1906; it might also be because it makes more sense for an organization with an actual Cuban team, and a full name that invokes both the United States and Cuba, to call itself the “International League,” rather than the “National Association.” There might be other explanations for this confusion, too, which I think are related to the reason the league failed in the end. I’ll discuss this in a future post.

By the way, in the Seamheads DB I’ve chosen to go with “National Association” for 1907 and 1908, because nearly all references to it during those years use that name. But I’ve gone with “International League” for 1909, when it becomes the favored name (largely due to Lester Walton, it must be said).

rube speaks

During the winter of 1926, Wesley Rollo Wilson, the dean of east coast black sportswriters, conducted an interview with Rube Foster that has become a key text in the modern reconstruction of Negro league history. I first happened upon it because I was looking for more information about the confusion between Walter Ball and George “Georgia Rabbit” Washington—but there’s a lot more here.

It was really not so much an interview as an oration by Rube Foster with Wilson as stenographer.

 

(Pittsburgh Courier, January 16, 1926, p. 12)

This column has been used as the source for a number of oft-repeated nuggets, claims, and facts, not all of which are strictly speaking accurate, though by no means is it a totally unreliable source. There are a few small corrections you could make to this column. Rube’s years are a little off sometimes—Pete Hill didn’t leave for Chicago until a year after Foster did, in 1907, for example, and Rube joined the Philadelphia Giants in 1904 rather than 1903—but these are trivial.

These are a few of the more interesting (and questionable, or in one case misquoted) claims that have been frequently cited and repeated, but only rarely (if ever) actually examined:

•Rube Foster names the 1910 Leland Giants “the greatest ball team in the history of the game, BAR NONE!”—and claims that the Leland Giants “won 123 games and lost 6.” I haven’t tried to compile all the games for the 1910 Lelands, but they did win 22 and lose only 2 (while tying 1) against black professional teams. In Cuba in the fall of 1910, however, they won 7, lost 5, and tied one—making their overall record against Cuban and “Negro league” teams for the calendar year 29-7-2. I’d guess Rube wasn’t counting Cuban games.

•Rube considered Bill Monroe “the greatest player who ever lived and one who would have been a star in any league. Ask John McGraw—he knows.” I think this quote has been a garbled a little and transformed into McGraw (rather than Foster) declaring Monroe “the greatest player of all time” (for example, see Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, p. 561).

•Rube claims that the heavyweight champ Jack Johnson—“Yes, THE Jack Johnson”—played first base for the Philadelphia Giants in 1903 and 1904. This is apparently the source for Johnson’s entry in Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 436), where Riley takes Rube’s claim at face value.  Needless to say, Johnson was not the Giants’ first baseman, then or ever. He was a friend of Foster, however, and there were some other baseball connections for Jack Johnson, which I might write about some other time.

•Rube declares that “In all the years I pitched I lost only SIX games to colored teams.” He had a great winning percentage, but not that great: 48-17 against black professional teams in the U.S., and 19-13 against Cuban teams in Cuba. Again, he probably wasn’t counting the Cubans. (I haven’t tried to separate out his wins over Cuban Stars teams in the U.S. from his overall “Negro league” record—maybe if you don’t count Cuban teams at all, anywhere, his claim holds up…)

There are also a couple of nuggets of information here that haven’t been much remarked on, but that are also pretty interesting.

•He says that when John Henry Lloyd joined the Lelands he was an outfielder until the shortstop (George Wright was the 1909 Lelands’ shortstop) fell ill in Jacksonville, presumably during spring training. “Lloyd was brought in to fill the position and our shortstop lost his job forever.” Of course Lloyd had already been a middle infielder for several years with the Cuban X-Giants and Philadelphia Giants. It’s hard to believe he wasn’t signed to play shortstop for the Lelands. Yet Rube seems to be saying here that he meant to convert Lloyd into an outfielder until fate intervened.

•And of course there’s the original reason I became interested in this interview. Talking about the Philadelphia Giants, he remarks that “Georgia Rabbit” Washington joined the team. This provides solid confirmation of my circumstantial case that George Washington (and not Walter Ball) was the “Georgia Rabbit” that Sol White was referring to in his book. To underline this point, earlier in the column, when Rube refers to Walter Ball coming to Chicago to play for the “Union Giants” in 1906 (Foster, or Wilson, means the Leland Giants) he calls him “Thomas Walter Ball,” and not George Washington Ball. (Official documents call him “Walter Thomas Ball.”)

history out of focus

Here’s another example of nearly unreadable microfilm: the Indianapolis Freeman, one of the most important sources for black baseball in the 1910s.  This is a box score for a game between the American Giants and Cuban Stars (not the Cuban Giants, as the box score mistakenly has it in one place), printed in the September 22, 1917, issue of the Freeman. 



This box score (and much of the rest of 1917) appeared this way in several microfilm readers I tried, so it wasn’t the reader.  Maybe the original newsprint was smeared in places.  But as I recall (I read this paper several months ago), the microfilm gave the distinct impression of simply having been filmed out of focus—another case of microfilm malpractice.  The quality through 1917 varied—much of it, while not great, is readable, or at least better than the above—but as the reel moved into 1918, it became less and less legible, until I finally gave up.

I’m also reasonably certain that there are multiple versions of these years floating around out there (and it could also be that the original paper copies exist somewhere).  If anybody has seen better, legible versions of the 1917 and/or 1918 Freeman, I’d love to hear from you.

Incidentally, Google News Archive has a good run of the Freeman (from 1888 to 1915, it appears).

history in fragments

Anybody who knows better can tell me differently, but as far as I know there is only a single microfilm edition of the Chicago Defender.  The original copy came (I believe) from the University of Chicago.  Unfortunately, while this is a decent run of the paper, it is far from complete or pristine.  Some entire issues are missing, or are represented by only a couple of pages (such as July 14 and July 21, 1917).   Since the Defender was in those days a weekly paper, such gaps in the record can have a huge impact.

Then there are problems like this:  a full, play-by-play account of an American Giants-Cuban Stars game (played on June 10, 1917, one of the few games Dick Redding lost all season) that was mangled in the University of Chicago’s original copy of the paper.  We’re left with only the first four and a half innings.  You can just make out that Frank Warfield threw out Bill Francis to start the bottom of the fifth; but what happened to Leroy Grant or Bruce Petway, who batted after him?

 

Now, if another library—just one other library—has a run of the actual, printed-on-paper Chicago Defender, we would stand a very good chance of being able to fill in the gaps left by the standard microfilm edition—just as I did with a couple of Cuban Stars games in 1921.  But did  anybody else save the paper?  It’s true that probably not that many libraries would have subscribed to and saved African-American newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century; but really, no place else, not even in New York City or Philadelphia, or even somewhere else in Chicago?  And what about the Chicago Defender itself?  What little I know about it suggests that black weeklies, due to cost and space constraints, simply haven’t been able to keep complete archives, especially from decades ago.

If anybody knows of a library or collection or archive that houses an honest-to-goodness dead-tree run of the Defender (not just a few scattered issues, but a stretch of years) from the first three or four decades of the twentieth century, let me know.

the cool papa conundrum

I have been mildly critical of Joe Posnanski before, but his piece on Scott’s Negro league set for Strat-O-Matic is easily the best thing I’ve seen written about it so far (and it has gotten a lot of coverage).  I especially like this part:

I have always been drawn to stories about Cool Papa Bell. And I have always been repelled by them, too. You know the stories I'm talking about, right? Cool Papa Bell was so fast that he once hit a line drive up the middle and was hit by the ball as he slid into second base. Cool Papa Bell was so fast that he once scored from first on a bunt. Cool Papa Bell was so fast that he would steal second and third on the same pitch. Cool Papa Bell was so fast that managers would play six infielders and let Cool Papa handle the outfield. Cool Papa Bell -- here's the famous one -- was so fast that he could turn out the light and be in bed before the room got dark.

There's something charming about these lines, of course. But there's something phony about them, too. Cool Papa Bell was a real man, flesh and blood, who played in various Negro leagues from the early 1920s to the mid-1940s. He was, by surviving accounts, a breathtakingly fast player who could chase down fly balls all over the park and beat out routine ground balls to shortstop. He hit .300 just about every year, often hit .330, sometimes hit .350. But he did not hit .900, and he did not steal two bases on single pitches with regularity, and in fact most of the sketchy numbers that have been gathered show disappointingly low stolen base totals for Cool Papa throughout his career. The Shades of Glory numbers -- the data gathered by the Baseball Hall of Fame Negro Leagues study -- show Cool Papa with only 144 stolen bases in 865 recorded games.

[…]

The Cool Papa Conundrum, as I call it, is to me the toughest part about remembering and celebrating the Negro leagues. On the one hand, these myths and nicknames and stories are so wonderful and poignant and memorable. And on the other hand, they can turn these players into something more or something less than they were. And often they can turn players in something more AND something less than they were at the same time.

When people would ask Buck how fast Cool Papa Bell was, his answer was always the same. “Faster than that,” he would say. Buck spent a lifetime trying to keep alive the memories of men who were denied their chance to play baseball in the major leagues. Sometimes, at the end of his life, I sensed that he worried that people would remember the stories but they would forget the men.

Read the whole thing.

(On the issue of Cool Papa’s speed, see also this post.)

lost treasures

Robert Sengstacke, heir to the founder of the Chicago Defender, has donated what sounds like hundreds of boxes of files to the Chicago Public Library.  I wonder what baseball-related artifacts have lain hidden all these years?

“some great Turkey Stearnes stories”

A couple of months ago Joe Posnanski wrote the following, in the course of a “manifesto” about the Hall of Fame:

Everyone here, I suspect, knows how much I love the Negro Leagues and how much I appreciate what the Baseball Hall of Fame has done to honor those great players who excelled on rock hard diamonds and little towns while America turned away. Everyone, in the end, must believe what they believe, but I have no doubt in my mind that Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Martin Dihigo, Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard and others were as great as anyone who came before or since. But the point of this exercise, again, is to get at the heart of the Hall of Fame, and realistically knowing some great Turkey Stearnes stories is fun, but doesn’t help much in the process. We just don’t have enough information about those players.

He’s not trying to claim that Negro Leaguers don’t belong in the Hall of Fame or anything like that (obviously), but rather he’s arguing that there’s no way to use them to help establish standards for the Hall—because all we have are “some great Turkey Stearnes stories.”  This pretty much presents, in a nutshell, the conventional wisdom that all our research is dedicated to overthrowing—the notion that the Negro Leagues exist in some hazy netherworld of unverifiable myth, tall tales, gut feelings, subjective judgments.  There is, in fact, a vast body of quite verifiable fact and analyzable data waiting for us, locked away in crumbling newspaper files and microfilm spools and old records.

The great task of Negro League researchers is to make it as difficult as possible for sportswriters (especially ones as sympathetic to the Negro Leagues as Poz) to say something like this.  We’ll never fully succeed in banishing such assumptions, or putting the records of Negro Leaguers on the same footing (in terms of accuracy and comprehensiveness) as those of major leaguers, but we have to try. 

And wouldn’t it be great if you could eventually say of some player, “Well, his career looks a lot like Turkey Stearnes’s—how can you keep him out of the Hall?”

edition extinction

In the old days, newspapers often published several editions a day.  I’m not talking about morning and evening papers (which were usually separate titles in any case), but rather different versions of the same paper released throughout the day on a regular schedule, with the contents updated and rearranged, along with extras to cover extraordinary breaking news.

As Nicholson Baker has pointed out in his fine book Double Fold, one effect of the microfilming movement was to more or less eliminate editional variety from our libraries.  There’s usually only one microfilmed version of any given newspaper generally available, and when libraries throw out their bound copies of papers in favor of microfilmed versions purchased from UMI or wherever, that newspaper is increasingly represented only by whatever edition was microfilmed.  The other versions of the paper are lost.

Negro League history is especially vulnerable to this winnowing process.  While some daily newspapers, especially in smaller cities, treated Negro League games as genuine news events, big city papers tended to regard blackball box scores as space fillers, useful in earlier editions, but liable to be cut in later ones as fresher items crowded them out.  Since we’re usually left with a single microfilm version of any given newspaper, there’s really no recourse.  The box scores that might have been cut are gone, probably forever. 

However, I’ve recently discovered that this is not always the case.   A May 6, 1922, Negro National League game between the Cleveland Tate Stars and Pittsburgh Keystones appears in one microfilmed edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but not in another.  The version that does NOT have the box score was filmed by Bell & Howell (now ProQuest).  I don’t know who filmed the other version, the one WITH the box score (it was provided to me by another researcher).  A couple of guesses would be the Ohio Historical Society or the Library of Congress.  Also, the record for the Plain Dealer in Harvard’s catalog indicates that their version is part of the “Harvard College Library newspaper preservation microfilm program.”

So, at least when it comes to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, it might pay to be aware that if a box score is missing, it might still exist in another microfilm edition.  Though it also appears that it might be a little difficult to track down these variants.

rescued from the dustbin of history

A while back I wrote about a couple of Cuban Stars’ box scores from 1921 that are unreadable on the microfilm of the Cincinnati Enquirer.  Here’s what they look like:

(Cincinnati Enquirer, May 22, 1921)

(Cincinnati Enquirer, July 9, 1921)

I found these mangled box scores several years ago, and had long assumed that the games were probably not recoverable.  The Chicago Defender, which printed many, many NNL box scores that year, did not cover these games; and other Cincinnati papers besides the Enquirer proved impossible to obtain.  Eventually, with the help of a magnifying glass and some prodigious squinting on my part, I deciphered the blurry one, though I didn’t think I could really be certain I’d gotten it all correct.  But nothing could be done for the July 8 game that had been sliced in half.

The last resort would be to consult actual hard copies of the newspaper.  But, as Nicholson Baker ferociously chronicles in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, the old bound sets of newspapers have been mostly replaced by microfilm, and the hard copies often no longer exist.  The set used in making the microfilm is literally destroyed, cut loose from the binding, and the loose pages usually thrown away; worse than this, libraries that buy the microfilm frequently discard their own perfectly good sets.  Too often, all that’s left of entire runs of great newspapers is a single microfilm set, endlessly reproduced in library after library.  If the microfilm is flawed or missing issues, there’s nothing you can do.  Whatever’s gone is simply gone.  So I assumed these games (or at least the July 8 one) had been lost forever.

This story, however, has a happy ending.  The Cincinnati Public Library, I found out recently, has retained bound volumes of the Enquirer; and through the efforts of reference librarian Marianne Reynolds, who lugged the volumes from the stacks and used a special photocopier to preserve their bindings, these box scores have been rescued.  Now a great game by Bernardo Baró (a home run and two “brilliant” ninth-inning, rally-killing catches) and a rare home run by Cubans’ shortstop Matías Ríos, among other events, have been restored to history.  For the sake of anyone else who might be flummoxed by the Enquirer microfilm, here they are:

(Cincinnati Enquirer, May 22, 1921)

(Cincinnati Enquirer, July 9, 1921)