Agate Type

Rube Foster in Kankakee

Jimmy Yancey & Rube Foster

 

If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check out ESPN’s “The Diary of Myles Thomas,” an account of the 1927 Yankees from the (fictionalized) perspective of a minor figure on the team, the pitcher Myles Thomas. I’m not doing any of the writing on the “Diary,” but I have been helping with some research, as one of its central conceits is that Myles was a jazz aficionado who encountered black musicians and ballplayers. The latest entry shows us Rube Foster, confined in the asylum at Kankakee, Illinois, in 1927.

One of the main things I’ve done for them is figure out how we can plausibly have Myles encounter certain stories. It's fiction, sure, but we've been trying hard to make it believable fiction, to give it a sturdy grounding in nuts-and-bolts research. So we work out a lot of scenarios like, “Can we place Myles Thomas at the Negro League World Series in 1925? Or, failing that, can we place Myles in the same room as somebody who did see the ’25 World Series—before the end of the 1927 season?”

In the case of this particular entry, Jimmy Yancey, an early practitioner of boogie woogie piano, serves as the link between Myles and Rube Foster. Yancey was for many years a groundskeeper at Comiskey Park, and his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entry says he played baseball for the “Chicago All-Americans” during World War I, which seems likely to be a reference to Foster’s American Giants (although I haven’t been able to substantiate any playing time for him with any teams I’m familiar with). (Using Yancey, by the way, is a fantastic idea—one I had nothing to do with.)

Quick notes about a couple of things:

• Yancey tells Myles the story that Rube Foster taught Christy Mathewson how to throw his famous “fadeaway” pitch. This was debunked by Dick Thompson in the Baseball Research Journal in 1996 (Mathewson learned it from a minor league pitcher named Dave Williams in 1898). The guys behind the “Diary” (Douglas Alden and John Thorn) are aware of this, and consciously chose to have Yancey help spread the legend.

•Yancey also tells the story that Foster gained his nickname by defeating Rube Waddell and the Philadelphia A’s. This is well-trodden ground, of course; it appears likely (in my opinion) that Foster in fact defeated Waddell and the white semipro Murray Hills in 1903, but Foster never seems to have faced the Athletics (though the A’s did play the Philadelphia Giants several times in the 1900s). In 1907, however, he stated in print that he beat Waddell and the A’s in 1905. Since Foster himself told the story this way, it makes perfect sense that Yancey could have heard it directly from him.

omara portuondo

Courtesy of Larry Lester, here’s something to file under “Things I Should Have Known But Didn’t”: Omara Portuondo, one of Cuba’s most famous singers, is the daughter of Bartolo Portuondo, Cuban League and Negro league infielder in the 1910s and 1920s.  He captured stolen base crowns in the 1919/20 Cuban League (with Almendares) and the 1920 Negro National League (with the Kansas City Monarchs).

This is from Omara’s biography at World Music Central:

“Omara Portuondo was born in Cayo Hueso (Havana) in 1930. Omara’s mother came from a rich Spanish family and was expected to marry into another society family. Instead she ran off with the man she loved, a tall, handsome baseball player from the Cuban national team. Moreover he was black and in those days mixed race marriages were still frowned upon in Cuba. “My mother always hid the fact that she had married a black man. If they bumped into each other in the street they had to ignore each other. But at home they recreated what society denied them - a haven of peace and harmony. They loved each other very much,” Omara recalls.



“They had three daughters and as in any Cuban household there was music. There wasn’t a gramophone - they didn’t have the money. Even as a small child, Omara showed a natural aptitude for singing, picking up both melody and harmony lines from listening to her parents singing together. Her father was a good aficionado singer--he had gone to school with the songwriter Eliseo Grenet, and they remained friends, so that music was a constant in Omara's childhood home. Omara remembers her parent’s favorite music, which included songs by Ernesto Grenet and Sindo Garay’s ‘La Bayamesa’. They were her first informal singing lessons and the songs remain in her repertoire to this day.”

Omara has an official website and Facebook page.  And here she is singing “Silencio” with Ibrahim Ferrer in the Wim Wenders film Buena Vista Social Club:

 

UPDATE 1/9/2013 Here is a link to an English translation of a Cuban blogger's piece about Omara Portuondo.

“negro league baseball”

A friend just alerted me to this classic slice of indie hip-hop from the late 1990s, “Negro League Baseball” by Natural Resource.  The baseball’s really a metaphor for the major-label rap scene, but it’s still cool.  Scroll down to stream the audio.  (It’s the “dirty” version, in case you’re at work or something.)