Agate Type

Cuban Baseball Guides

I want to extend my thanks to Jason Mishelow, who recently loaned me three Cuban baseball guides from the 1945/46, 1946/47, and 1948/49 winter seasons. Here are the covers of two of them:

There are certainly some cool images inside these guides. Here is a team photo of the Almendares club, champions of the 1946/47 Cuban League:

Here is a page showing the league leaders and award winners for the 1948/49 season, including home run leader Monte Irvin, RBI leader Lennie Pearson, and runs scored leader Hank Thompson:

The 1948/49 guide also features a photo of the groundskeeper for El Gran Estadio de La Habana, which hosted all Cuban League games in 1948/49. Although his name is misspelled here, it is none other than Alfredo Cabrera, legendary Cuban League shortstop, career U.S. minor leaguer, and cup-of-coffee major leaguer in 1913. Here’s his picture in the 1948/49 guide side-by-side with his 1909 Cabañas card:

But the most important aspect of these Cuban baseball guides is the fact that they printed box scores for every single Cuban League game played during these three seasons.

This means that we can go well beyond the numbers published in Jorge Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball: A Statistical History, to obtain fielding statistics, batters’ walks, pitchers’ home runs allowed, and so on—just as I’ve been able to do from newspaper box scores for Cuban League seasons in the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s.

Thanks again to Jason for generously providing this amazing material. If anybody else has Cuban baseball guides—from any season—please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

St. Louis Stars, 1931

In the era of segregation, mainstream (white) newspapers generally ignored black baseball teams, aside from publishing box scores (as they did for nearly all high-profile baseball games, at least before the 1930s). There was very little reporting, very few interviews with players, managers, or owners, and almost no commentary. There were exceptions, however. On July 26, 1931, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat Magazine published a two-and-a-half-page article, with photos, on the St. Louis Stars. Here, courtesy of Newspapers.com, are images of the article. There is a ton of interesting detail in it.

Sadly, the Globe-Democrat was a little late with this effort, as both the original Negro National League and the original St. Louis Stars were already on their last legs. The last NNL games took place exactly a month after the publication of this article (August 26), and the Stars would play their last known game (against the Max Carey All Stars) on October 2, 1931.

Goose Tatum, 1946

Goose Tatum & King Tut

 

Len Durrant alerted me to this silent film (posted by the National Film Preservation Foundation) showing Goose Tatum of the Cincinnati-Indianapolis Clowns doing his thing in Cincinnati’s Crosley Field during a September 8, 1946, doubleheader against the Kansas City Monarchs. Tatum, of course, is more famous now as a Harlem Globetrotters star, but in the 1940s he may have been just as well-known as a baseball player.

Here are a few highlights:

0:16 Talking in the dugout, left to right: Eddie “Peanuts” Davis (number 14), Goose Tatum, and “King Tut” (Richard King).

1:20 Manager Jesse “Hoss” Walker in the dugout as the Clowns (including Tatum and catcher Sam Hairston) take the field.

1:58 Leo “Preacher” Henry warming up.

3:16 Buck O’Neil being thrown out at first.

3:40 Tatum batting left-handed (demonstrating that he was a switch-hitter).

4:12 Buck O’Neil playing first base.

5:20 Hilton Smith coaching at first base for the Monarchs.

5:43 Tatum attempting a hidden ball trick on Herb Souell (who, frankly, seems less than impressed).

I don’t know if these film clips were distributed in any way at the time, but they were obviously put together to highlight Tatum, not to provide an account of the games that were played that day. As it happens, the Monarchs, who had already clinched both halves of the Negro American League season and were headed to the World Series against the Newark Eagles, swept the second-division Clowns 15-5 and 8-5, clouting nine home runs in the process (none of which we see here). Hank Thompson hit four homers on the day, and Willard Brown three, including one clear out of the stadium. To be honest, I would rather have seen some of that action instead of the clowning.

(Cincinnati Enquirer, September 9, 1946, p. 15)

 

Most likely the film was made at the behest of Syd Pollock, who was marketing Tatum pretty heavily as the star of the Clowns’ comedy baseball routine:

(Newark OH Advocate, July 16, 1946, p. 10)

Cuba's Champions

Here’s a photograph I’ve never seen before, showing the Cuban Stars of 1907 prior to a series of games in Chicago with white semipro teams. It’s not a particularly great image quality-wise (having passed through microfilming then scanning), but they look resplendent in jerseys that proclaim them “Cuba’s Champions,” along with some spiffy-looking sweaters.

(Chicago Daily News, May 28, 1907)

In actuality Almendares were the reigning champions of Cuba. The 1907 Cuban Stars did feature a few Almendares players, though, including the pitchers José Muñoz and Inocencio Pérez, outfielder Miguel Prats, and third baseman (and future major leaguer) Rafael Almeida. (Incidentally, the caption here is the first time I’ve seen Almeida identified as the Cuban Stars’ captain that year.)

Cobb & Redding, 1916

I’ve been asked recently (see this comment) whether Ty Cobb ever faced Cannonball Dick Redding. In a 1932 interview with the Chicago Defender (posted here by Ryan Whirty) Redding himself said (or at least implied) that he had played against Cobb in Cuba. Many of the claims in that article are maybe a bit exaggerated, and some are simply false—this one is in the latter category. Ty Cobb only played baseball in Cuba once, in 1910. Redding came to Cuba several times, beginning in the 1911/12 winter season, and he never faced the Detroit Tigers or Cobb there.

In fact, according to many sources, after the 1910 series in Havana, Cobb vowed never to play against black players again. I’ve so far been unable to figure out where this story originated. In any case Charles Alexander affirms that Cobb never did face black players again in his career, and I’ve never seen anyone suggest otherwise.

So no, there’s no known instance of Cobb facing off against Redding in a game. However—John Holway wrote that Cobb once “refused to hit against [Redding] in batting practice,” but gave no specifics. I have found a just such an incident, though not in batting practice.

In the 1910s George Weiss, future Yankees (and much later, Mets) president and Hall of Famer, ran the New Haven Colonials, an independent team that often outdrew the city’s minor league club. In 1916 he hired Ty Cobb to play in five games (as a first baseman) after the regular season was over. As it happened, the town team in Putnam, Connecticut, brought in Dick Redding to pitch during the October barnstorming season in both 1915 and 1916. On Sunday, October 8, 1916, the Putnams played host to the Colonials. Cobb was the headliner obviously, but both Redding and Jimmy Clinton, a white semipro star (there’s a chapter on him in Scott Simkus’s wonderful book Outsider Baseball), were given secondary billing as Putnam’s answers to Cobb.

(Hartford Courant, October 7, 1916, p. 19)

 

(Norwich Bulletin, October 6, 1916, p. 9)

Putnam won the game 1-0, as Redding threw four innings in relief and doubled to help score the game’s only run. He struck out the first seven batters he faced—but Cobb had already left the game. After delaying the contest for an hour while negotiating his fee, Cobb “by previous agreement stopped playing when it was half over when Cannonball Redding the great colored pitcher went in to work for Putnam.” Cobb didn’t play especially well, and the Norwich Bulletin reported that Redding “was given a great ovation by the crowd to whom he proved much more of an attraction than the high salaried Cobb.”

(Norwich Bulletin, October 9, 1916, p. 3)

This was pretty unusual. In fact, I can’t think of another instance of a predetermined agreement for a player to leave a game due to the entrance of another player.

A couple of years later the Bulletin printed an anecdote about Pat Cawley, the Colonials’ manager, who had to put himself in to hit for Cobb against Redding. The article attributes the arrangement for Cobb to exit the game directly to Cobb’s “southern prejudices”:

(Norwich Bulletin, October 22, 1918, p. 3)

(I’m not the first person to notice this incident: Howard W. Rosenberg wrote about it in Ty Cobb Unleashed, though I haven’t read the book.)

The 1899 All-Cubans

(A version of the following piece was originally posted at Negro League History as part of the Cuban Newspaper Project.)

One of the preludes to the integration of Cuban baseball in 1900 was the first visit by a professional Cuban team to the United States. The Spanish imperial authorities had always been suspicious of baseball, and at various times had banned or otherwise hampered the sport; but in the aftermath of the war of 1898, with U.S. authorities established in the island, the first fully fledged Cuban League season in many years was begun in February 1899. In June it was announced that as soon as the current championship was over, a team called the “All-Cubans,” made up of players from all three Cuban League teams, would travel to the United States.

The team was organized by a young promoter named Abel Linares. One of his recent accomplishments had been to convince Reach & Co., the American sporting goods company, to donate a cup for the Cuban League championship. Now he aimed to show off Cuban talent in the country of baseball’s origin. Several years later he wrote about the genesis of his idea:

When base ball in Cuba was in its infancy, in that time of true amateurism, there came to the island picked nines of American players. Because of lack of experience, or maybe fear, the Cuban clubs received sovereign scourges (“zurras soberanas”) at the hands of these masters who visited us.

Time passed, with our players learning more every day, and now the Americans could not beat us so easily. Many times we even managed to defeat them, although it took some work.

My trips to the United States had led me to conceive the belief that our players were not as deficient as they said; that Cubans had as much of an aptitude for baseball as Americans; and that if we overcame our defects in teamwork, which were due to a lack of direction in the field, and became more aggressive batters, we could, if not defeat them, at least put up a good fight.

Based on this belief, and with a double motivation of business and Cuban pride, I came up with the idea of organizing a Cuban team and taking it to tour the United States, in search of glory and money.

(Abel Linares, “Los Cubanos en los Estados Unidos,” in El Base Ball en Cuba y America, edited by Ramón S. de Mendoza, José María Herrero, and Manuel F. Calcines [Havana: Imirenta, Comas, y López, 1908], p. 74)

The All-Cubans were a virtual all-star team of the Cuban game, including players from all three of the Cuban League teams. Here’s a photo, printed on the first page of the July 16 issue of El Base Ball, with all the players’ identities penciled in by an unknown reader:

(El Base Ball, July 16, 1899, p. 1)

If you can’t read the handwriting, here’s who’s pictured in the photo:

Back row: Agustín “Tinti” Molina, Emilio Hernández, Abel Linares, Antonio María García (“El Inglés,” usually said to be the best player in 19th-century Cuban baseball), Moisés Quintero

Middle row: Daniel Miguel, Manuel López (“El Cartero”), Bernardo Carrillo, Esteban Prats

Front row: Felo Rodríguez, Miguel Prats, José Baeza

Not pictured: Alfredo Arcaño, Carlos Royer

This picture shows the players in their regular club uniforms: Cuba, Almendares, and Habana (the dark shirts or jackets). According to El Base Ball (June 18, 1899), the All-Cubans were to wear a “blue shirt and trousers with the name in dark red, a white sash, and dark red stockings.” Sounds pretty resplendent. On July 31 the New York Sun confirmed that these uniforms (with a slight variation) were indeed used: “The visitors wore dark blue flannel uniforms with the words ‘All Cubans’ in white letters on their shirt fronts. Their stockings and caps were red, and several of them wore the old-fashioned white canvas baseball shoes.” Here’s a photo of Miguel Prats in his All-Cubans duds (with white lettering):

(El Score, July 29, 1900, p. 1)

As a novelty the Cubans drew some interest from the American press; the most hyped game was probably their contest against the West New York Field Club, a semipro team, at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 30. The Cubans lost 8 to 5, but put up a good fight. According to the New York Sun, fans who were “expecting to see a burlesque exhibition of baseball…were agreeably disappointed. Fifteen hundred spectators were there and were ready to guy the visitors at every opportunity, but before the practice was over the cranks had learned to respect them.”

The Sun singled out several Cuban players for praise, particularly center fielder Alfredo Arcaño and the pitcher-captain Rafael “Felo” Rodríguez, both of whom “played such good ball that before the game was over the crowd applauded them continually.” Rodríguez exhibited “beautiful control and some sharp curves.” He threw “a swift out-drop and a high jump ball with plenty of speed.”

(El Score, February 24, 1901, p. 1)

In the seventh inning he walked Voorhis, the West New York pitcher. Voorhis was suffering from a “lame leg” and wanted to put in a courtesy pinch runner, but Rodríguez objected. When the umpire agreed with Felo and refused to allow the pinch runner, Rodríguez “turned half a dozen cartwheels across the diamond, winding up in the box with a back somersault.”

For his part, Arcaño, a former Cuban League batting champ, got the “best hit of the game, a rattling two-bagger to the left field fence,” and snared several hard drives to the outfield “with remarkable ease.” Despite being in his mid-thirties and “thick set,” Arcaño was “fleeter-footed than anybody else on the field, and as a coacher he kept the crowd in good humor from start to finish”:

Arcano chattered in Spanish so incessantly that the bleacherites soon tried to imitate him, and toward the close they were howling in unison something that sounded like this:

“Wallo, wallo, wallo! Cutta, cutta, cutta! Chickee, chickee, chickee! Wow wow, wow wow, wow wow wow! Hurray!”

But Arcano paid no attention and continued his exhortations until the last man was out. (New York Sun, July 31, 1899, p. 9)

(El Score, December 29, 1901, p. 1)

A week later, the All-Cubans inflicted an epic 26 to 8 defeat on the Hoboken town team, and then Linares arranged a pretty high profile matchup for the All-Cubans: a showdown with the Cuban X Giants, ostensibly as a protest against the X Giants “posing as the representatives of Cuba.”

On August 13, the two teams faced off on the St. George Cricket Grounds in Hoboken. The All Cubans, wracked by illness and injury, had to use an American pitcher from Port Jervis named Perez (it’s unclear who this is exactly, but it could be a guy named Raymond B. Perez, who played both football and baseball for the Marion Field Club, and is the only athlete named “Perez” I could find in the New York area around this time). The Cuban X-Giants put in James Dorsey Robinson, known as the “Black Rusie,” to oppose him. According to the Jersey City Evening Journal, E. B. Lamar, manager of the Cuban X-Giants, was “determined to win, as a defeat by the real Cubans would rob his players of the prestige so long enjoyed.”

And win they did, the X-Giants taking the game 7 to 3, finding Perez’s curves easy to solve. The All Cubans were, however, the better fielding team, according to the Evening Journal.

After the game Lamar and Linares “had a very warm discussion in the clubhouse, in which [Felo] Rodriguez also took a hand.” Rodríguez maintained that “had he been in condition to pitch the result would have been different, and at his request Manager Linare[s] challenged Lamar to play another game…next Sunday, the winning team to take all the receipts, less expenses.”

The challenge was accepted. True to his word, Rodríguez, now recovered from the sprained ankle that had kept him out of the previous game, was in the pitching box—but it didn’t matter. The X Giants belted three home runs off him, won 11 to 6, and took home all the receipts.

Despite the warm words between Linares and Lamar (which may have just been a PR fiction for the sports pages), this was the start of a lasting business relationship. It could be that this was when the idea was hatched for the Cuban X Giants’ first trip to Cuba the following spring. Back in Cuba El Base Ball reported briefly on the first game against the Cuban X Giants, which they called “the famous colored club, one of the strongest in the United States.” “It’s only to be expected: our boys [they use the English word “boys” here] resisted, but couldn’t conquer the famous blacks, who almost always beat their opponents” (El Base Ball, August 20, 1899, p. 3).

The All-Cubans may have had cause to regret the terms of the wager over the second game. In the next few weeks any cash at all would have come in handy.

Linares was relying on Al Lawson as his U.S. connection. Lawson, an English-born minor league pitcher, got a brief opportunity to play in the National League during the Players League revolt in 1890. After that, at the age of 21, he brought a barnstorming team of minor leaguers to Cuba during the winter of 1890/91. This team included a teenaged John McGraw, whose acrobatics at shortstop in the garish uniforms Lawson supplied to his team earned him the nickname “el mono amarillo”—the yellow monkey.

Lawson tried to drum up publicity for the All-Cubans by making showy side bets with the managers of opposing teams, but the promise that Linares’s team would face the “best clubs” in the United States proved to be false. The games booked for the All-Cubans were mostly with semi-pro or local amateur teams. An article in El Base Ball explained in late August:

The greatest difficulties encountered by the All-Cubans in the United States lay less in the strength of the American teams, as many here [in Cuba] had crowed, and more in other challenges found there. Since the major leagues are still going on in that country, and the second-order clubs play in their own leagues, the All-Cubans cannot play every day in the same place. Instead they are obliged to go from town to town offering occasional exhibitions, which are not very appealing to the American public.

According to what we hear, the manager of the All-Cubans will rent the Polo Grounds at the end of this month, when the New York club will be in the West. If Linares achieves this purpose, we do not doubt that the Cubans pick up more than the laurels of victory: they will also gain good greenbacks with which to return to their native soil. (“All Cubans,” El Base Ball, August 20, 1899, p. 3.)

Sickness and injury ravaged the All-Cubans’ lineup, knocking star pitcher Felo Rodríguez and others out of many games. Linares scrambled to hire American players to plug the gaps. In the August 27 issue of El Base Ball, a writer reported encountering three of the All-Cubans—Antonio María García, Alfredo Arcaño, and Manuel López—back in Havana. Their steamship had managed to survive a hurricane.

Manuel López, Jose M. Baeza, and Emilio Hernández of the 1899 All-Cubans, all from the pages of El Score in 1900.

The All-Cubans never were able to secure the Polo Grounds. They began missing dates; the tour staggered into September before Linares decided to call it quits. Running out of cash, he finally sent the team back to Havana on the cheapest tickets available while he remained in New York with Daniel Miguel and Felo Rodríguez waiting for money to be sent from Cuba to pay for their return.

Al Lawson in 1890

Al Lawson’s participation in the All-Cubans tour wasn’t his finest hour. He would go on to start a couple of “outlaw” leagues (the Atlantic League in 1907, the Union League in 1908), both of which featured a number of Cuban players. but these efforts didn’t go anywhere. He went on to be a major player in the early commercial airline industry, and eventually founded his own religion, called Lawsonomy. (See Jerry Kuntz’s book Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines: The Many Lives and Outrageous Times of George and Alfred Lawson.)

Abel Linares

For Abel Linares this was merely a false start. He later acknowledged that the tour was a “tremendous failure,” but noted that “the appearance of the All-Cubans was always an event wherever we played. The exhibitions my players gave left the Yankees with their mouths open. They had thought they were the only ones who cultivated their national game with perfection.” He eventually tried again, with “more experience and better advice,” and “managed,” in his words, “to achieve great monetary and artistic success.” “Our achievements,” he wrote, “have made Cuban players known and sought after by American leagues, and I am proud and satisfied with that” (“Los Cubanos,” p. 75).

Of course Linares here is talking about the Cuban Leaguers who began to enter organized baseball in the United States in the 1900s, beginning with Esteban Prats and Juan Violá with Jacksonville of the South Atlantic League in 1904, and culminating in Armando Marsans and Rafael Almeida’s Fourth of July, 1911, debut with the Cincinnati Reds. But Cuban baseball was at the same time establishing other, quite different baseball connections with the United States. The highest profile games the All-Cubans played on their 1899 trip to the United States were against a black team, the Cuban X-Giants. The business relationship forged there would bear fruit within a few months. And it would shine a light of scrutiny on racial relations in Cuban baseball.

 

Johnnie Chenault

More than 10 years ago (!) I wrote about a false report of Rafael Figarola’s death in 1915, supposedly caused when a batting practice pitch from his teammate José Méndez struck him on the chest, triggering heart failure.

This turned out to be a mistake or hoax of some sort, and was retracted a week later, when it emerged that Figarola was alive and well in Cuba. As I pointed out back in 2007, however, the details of Figarola’s imaginary death uncannily echoed an event that had really happened in 1909. On July 10 of that year, in French Lick, Indiana, the catcher for the French Lick Plutos, a young man named John Chenault, died after being struck on the chest by a pitch from William Brannon of the Evansville O.K.’s.

This was one of three known on-field deaths of black professional ballplayers in the 1900s, the others being John García of the Cuban Giants, who suffered a heart attack during a 1904 game in Jamaica, Queens, and William Bedford, also of the Cuban Giants, who was struck by lightning in Atlantic City in 1909, about six weeks after Chenault’s death. A fourth, the pitcher George Washington of the Philadelphia Giants, died of heart failure in the clubhouse before a 1908 game in Winsted, Connecticut.

Here is a series of three items about the Chenault incident printed in The Freeman of Indianapolis (July 17, 1909, p. 4), which I originally posted as part of the piece about Figarola and Méndez:

I never followed up on Chenault beyond that initial post. But now, a decade later, Kevin Pope has sent me the following image:

It is a cabinet card, owned by the French Lick, West Baden Historical Society, showing “Johnnie Chenault,” with a typewritten note attached. This is, needless to say, the only photograph of Chenault I’ve ever seen, and it has inspired me to look a bit further into the sad occasion of his death, to see if anything can be added to the bare bones we already have.

The attached note adds a little detail to the scene of the incident, explaining that Chenault was “trying to bunt a fast inshoot”—an inshoot being a pitch that curves inside, toward the batter. I think the fact that it is captioned “Knight. Johnnie Chenault” indicates that he was a member of the Knights of Pythias, which is corroborated by the remark in the Freeman article entitled “French Lick Mourns” that Chenault “was a dutiful lodge member.”

I’ve also found a death record that gave his age as 21, and specified July 10 as his death date (perhaps settling the disagreement between the first two Freeman items above). I’ve been able to find a number of men named John Chenault in the Midwest who were born around the right time, and though I’ve ruled out a couple of them, I haven’t been able to positively identify anyone as the ballplayer.

As for the opposing team on that fateful July 10: the Evansville O.K.’s, a.k.a. the “E.O.K.’s,” were a black semipro team and, according to some sources, the reigning city champions of Evansville. They were active in 1908 and 1909. The pitcher who hit Chenault appears to have been a lefty named William Jennings Brannon, only 19 at the time. At 5’4” he was quite short for a pitcher; his World War I draft card would describe him as “stout,” though this may not have been the case when he was playing baseball.

Brannon may have been upset after Chenault’s death, but he was seemingly back pitching within a week (he sometimes appeared in the papers as “Brandon”; as far as I can tell Brannon and Brandon were the same person) :

(Evansville Journal, July 19, 1909, p.8)

In later years William Brannon worked as a tailor and as a domestic servant, and served in World War I in the Second Development Battalion at Camp Dodge, Iowa. By the 1940s he was blind and no longer working, and he passed away of heart trouble in 1947 at the age of 57. He is buried in Evansville’s Oak Hill Cemetery.

Brannon’s World War II draft card:

UPDATE 12/15/2018: It is possible that Chenault was a victim of “commotio cordis,” which the Merck Manual describes as:

the sudden stopping of the heart caused by a blow to the front of the chest. Typically this blow involves a hard object that is moving fast (such as a baseball or a hockey puck). Thus, commotio cordis usually occurs during sports activities in young people. The exact reason for cardiac arrest is unclear, but commotio cordis does not result from an underlying heart disorder or from physical damage to the heart muscle. Some experts think that cardiac arrest occurs because the blow occurs at a critical moment during the cycle that produces each heartbeat. The blow then disrupts the electrical signals that keep the heart pumping continuously and regularly.

York Colored Monarchs

 

In 1889 the Cuban Giants and the Colored Gorhams, the two most famous professional black baseball teams in the United States, joined the otherwise all-white Middle States League. The Cuban Giants competed for the pennant, which they barely lost to Harrisburg after some very questionable decisions by the league at season’s end. The following year a white promoter named James Monroe Kreiter signed most of the Cuban Giants away for a new team representing York. Kreiter’s club was called the Colored Monarchs, and it played in the Eastern Interstate League, a new circuit that replaced the Middle States League.

The team that had won the Middle States pennant in 1889, the Harrisburg Ponies, signed two of the Cuban Giants for 1890, Frank Grant and Clarence Williams. The Monarchs, however, still had future Hall of Famer Sol White as well as George Williams, Arthur Thomas, and William Selden. Each of these four finished in the top eight in batting average, Williams and Thomas finished 1-2 in slugging percentage, and the team proceeded to run away with the pennant. The Ponies were their only viable challenger. In July, however, Harrisburg jumped the league to join the Atlantic Association. The remainder of the Interstate League, with the York Monarchs way in front, voted to disband—a move, many have suspected, that was intended to prevent a black team from winning the championship.

There is but one well-known image of the York Colored Monarchs (above): drawings of ten players plus Kreiter, which ran in newspapers at the time, and has been reproduced in various places in recent decades.

Well, as it turns out, these drawings were based on a team photograph of the Monarchs. Kevin Pope has sent me images of the photograph, which currently resides in a private collection (not Kevin’s). This is one of the most amazing images I’ve seen in a long time. It may be that it is already known to some of you out there, but when I first saw it I was dumbfounded.

(Kevin photographed the image under less-than-ideal circumstances, resulting in a reflection obscuring the face of William Selden. But he provided another image that shows Selden—see below.)

Standing, L to R: Abe Harrison, William Malone, George Williams, Sol White, Arthur Thomas
Seated, middle: J. Monroe Kreiter
Seated, front row, L to R: William Whyte, Ben Boyd, Jack Frye, William Jackson, William Selden

 

Here are details of the various players, including Selden:

 

 ABE HARRISON

Abe Harrison (1867-1932) played for the Philadelphia Orions and the Argyle Hotel team before joining the Cuban Giants, for whom he played into the late 1890s. A talented infielder and on-field comedian, he was known as the “minstrel man short stop” (Trenton Evening Times, October 13, 1897, p. 8). He batted .255 with 25 stolen bases for York in 1890. I believe this is the first photograph of Harrison I’ve ever seen.

 

WILLIAM MALONE

William H. Malone (1868-1917) first played professionally for the Philadelphia Pythians of the National Colored League in 1887 before joining the Cuban Giants in 1888 and 1889, the York Monarchs in 1890, the Big Gorhams in 1891, and the Page Fence Giants in 1895. For the Monarchs he went 13-5 with a 2.74 ERA.

 

GEORGE WILLIAMS

George L. Williams (1864-1918) played for the Washington Manhattans and Philadelphia Orions before joining the Cuban Giants in 1885. The following year he became their captain. Before the 1887 season he was approached by both the Minneapolis Millers of the Northwestern League and the Oswego Starchboxes of the International League, but turned them down to remain with the Cuban Giants through the 1889 season (“Base Ball Gossip,” Trenton Evening Times, February 1, 1887, 1). Like many of his teammates he moved to the York Monarchs in 1890, where he captained the team, won the batting title with a .386 average, and led the league with a .582 slugging percentage. He spent 1891 with the Big Gorhams, then in 1892 joined the Philadelphia police department. He left briefly in 1905 and 1906 to organize the Wilmington Giants, but quickly returned to the force, becoming its first black detective in 1909. He was “noted for his daring,” and also for his generosity: every Christmas he organized food and gift drives for poor black families. In 1918 he was shot and killed in the line of duty (“Detective Slain Battling Thugs—George L. Williams, Former Cuban Giants Baseball Player, Is Shot,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10, 1918, 6).

 

SOL WHITE

Sol White probably needs no introduction to readers of this blog. His career as a professional ballplayer, manager, and coach, in black leagues, white minor leagues, for black independent teams, and in Cuba, has been very well-chronicled. He was the co-founder and manager of two of the most famous teams in black baseball history, the Philadelphia Giants and the New York Lincoln Giants, and wrote the first (and for many years only) book about African American professional baseball. For York in 1890 he hit .350 (third in the league), slugged .457, stole 21 bases, and finished second in the league with 74 runs scored. In 2006 he was very deservedly elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

 

ARTHUR THOMAS

Arthur Thomas (1864-1895) first caught for the Manhattan Base Ball Club of Washington, D. C., at the age of 15 in 1880. He joined the West End club of Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1881 and 1882, and in 1883 rejoined the Manhattans under S. K. Govern before moving with Govern to the Cuban Giants in 1885. He was described as “a good general player, a good batsman, fair base runner, and excellent throw to the bases” (“Good Game Promised,” Trenton Evening Times, May 9, 1886, p. 8). Sol White later said of Thomas:

He was 6 feet 4 inches in height; his arms almost reached his knees; he was sorta [sic] sway-backed and gangled-legged [sic]; he had a moaning voice and actually would cry when his team lost a game. His facial expressions were paradoxical; when he laughed you would have to look twice to see whether he was crying. An extremely hard worker, he ruled the roost including the captain. Thomas was a great receiver behind the bat. With his long arms he would reach out and grab wild pitches and when the ball left his hand for second base it looked like a long snake. (“Sol White Recalls,” New York Age, December 27, 1930, 6)

With the York Monarchs in 1890, Thomas hit .333 and led the league with 26 doubles and 11 triples, and finished second to his teammate George Williams in slugging percentage with .567. After leaving big-time baseball Thomas settled in Trenton, New Jersey, where he caught for and captained both black and white semipro teams. He died in Trenton of consumption (tuberculosis) at the age of 30 on August 8, 1895 (“Died,” Trenton Evening Times, August 11, 1895, 5; “Observations from the Grandstand,” Trenton Evening Times, August 9, 1896, 3).

 

J. MONROE KREITER

A member of a prominent Harrisburg family, James Monroe Kreiter, Jr. (1856-1911) was a ballplayer in his youth. He later managed Harrisburg’s Eastern League entry before founding the York Monarchs in 1890. His real job was as a printer for the Harrisburg Patriot newspaper, and he became active in the typographical union as well as local politics. He eventually secured a position as the U.S. government’s chief printer in Panama.

 

WILLIAM WHYTE

William T. Whyte (1860-1936) served as pitcher and outfielder for the St. Louis Black Stockings and Boston Resolutes before joining the Cuban Giants in 1885. He stayed with them through 1893, except for his year with the York Monarchs, where he went 11-5 with a 3.02 ERA, batted .302, and slugged .453. He retired to Trenton, New Jersey.

 

BEN BOYD

Benjamin F. Boyd (1858-?) was a veteran of the original Cuban Giants. He was born in Maryland in 1858, and started his baseball career in Washington, D. C., in 1874. “A good general player” and versatile infielder, he joined S. K. Govern’s Manhattan Base Ball Club in 1883, and played for the Cuban Giants (1885-1889), the York Monarchs (1890), and Big Gorhams (1891). He batted just .267 for the Monarchs, with a lone double as his only extra base hit.

 

JACK FRYE

John H. Frye (1864-1904) was the fifth known African American to play in organized baseball in the United States, appearing briefly for the Reading Actives of the Interstate Association late in the 1883 season. He came to the Actives from the Renovo, Pennsylvania, club, where he had caught for Patrick Friel, the team’s star pitcher. Friel moved to the Reading club, and a few weeks later Frye was brought in to catch for him (“McCafferty Struck,” Reading Eagle, September 15, 1883, 1). Of the 20 other players on the Reading roster that year, 17 would eventually play in the major leagues, including Friel, who would make it as a veteran outfielder in 1890 and 1891. Frye also played for another white team, Lewiston of the 1886 Pennsylvania State Association, before joining the Cuban Giants, where he would spend most of his career. With York in 1890 he batted .303 with a .438 slugging percentage. He retired from baseball after the 1896 season and moved to Culpeper County, Virginia, where he died on June 10, 1904 (“Bits for the Fans,” Harrisburg Telegraph, June 11, 1904, 8).

 

WILL JACKSON

A left-handed catcher, Will Jackson was in his first season as a professional. In 46 games he batted .251 and stole 18 bases. In 1894, Jackson and George Stovey formed a “left-handed battery” for the Cuban Giants. By the late 1890s, when Jackson had graduated to captaining the Giants, he was more of an outfielder. So far, given the commonness of his name, I haven’t been able to track down any specific information about him.
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WILLIAM SELDEN

Pitching for the Boston Resolutes of the National Colored League in 1887, William H. “Billy” Selden (1866-1926) won their only league game in Louisville, whereupon the team immediately went broke. Stranded, the players had to make their own way back to Boston. Selden, however, was signed by the Cuban Giants, and went on to a long career as a pitcher for black professional teams, including the Cuban Giants, Gorhams, and Cuban X-Giants. By the late 1890s he was spending the offseasons as a vaudeville performer. For York in 1890 he went 15-6, 2.63, with a league-second 100 strikeouts, and batted .330 with a .429 slugging percentage and 19 steals. Box score research shows him (so far) undefeated (11-0) against black professional teams in the 19th century. This is the first photograph I’ve seen of Selden.

 

 

 

A Negro Leaguer from Jamaica

Oscar “Chick” Levis (often appearing in box scores as just “Oscar” or “Oscal”) was a spitballing sidearm pitcher in Cuba and the Negro leagues in the 1920s. He was very good but not great—about a .500 pitcher in the Negro Leagues (48-49 at bb-ref, 38-38 at Seamheads, which is still missing 1927 and 1929), better than that in Cuba (48-38 according to Figueredo). Seamheads has him with an ERA+ of 105 in the Negro leagues, and 116 in the three Cuban seasons we’ve got so far. Perhaps his highwater mark was in the 1927/28 Cuban League, when he went 7-2 for the champion Habana club, and finished second in strikeouts to Willie Foster.

The well-known semipro catcher Paddy Smith, who played against Levis and the Cuban Stars (and other black teams) many times, had high praise for him in an interview with the Brooklyn Eagle in 1928:

As a catcher and as a hitter, Paddy Smith sees plenty of semi-professional pitching. He rates one of the semi-pros as a sure-fire success if he ever landed in the majors. That man is Oscal [sic], a burly right-handed ace of the Cuban Stars—a Negro, which automatically bars him from organized baseball under an unwritten rule.

“Oscal is as good a pitcher as you’ll find anywhere,” was Mr. Smith’s flat remark. “He has everything—speed to burn, curves, and perfect control. I wouldn’t rate any pitcher I ever saw above him.”

Paddy Smith’s opinion on the subject was so forceful that your reporter made a mental resolution to see him if the opportunity ever arises. (Brooklyn Eagle, October 16, 1928, p. 4A)

After Levis stopped pitching he managed the 1930s Cuban Stars club that was based in New York City and owned by Nat Strong and Max Rosner (not to be confused with Alex Pompez’s New York Cubans). Levis was also mixed up in the numbers racket with Pompez, which resulted in some brushes with the law, but by the 1940s he was running his own business in Harlem, Chick’s Bar and Grill. He eventually moved to Virginia, where he passed away in 1983.

Levis is usually understood to be from Panama. His Panamanian identity is mentioned in passing in some Cuban sources, such as Figueredo’s Who’s Who in Cuban Baseball (p. 399), in Roberto González Echevarría’s The Pride of Havana (p. 172), and in Severo Nieto’s Early U.S. Blackball Teams in Cuba (p. 155). George Palmer, a columnist for the New York Amsterdam News, called Levis “Panama-born” in 1947. James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, however, assumes that Levis was Cuban. He’s not mentioned in the very short Panama section in William McNeil’s Baseball’s Other All-Stars. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody make a big deal out of Levis being (as he apparently is) the first professional ballplayer from Panama to play in the United States. (His BR Bullpen entry does point out that he was the first non-Cuban Latin player in the Cuban League.)

What has gone completely unremarked until now, though, is that Levis was not actually born in Panama. His real name was Oscar Joseph Levy, and he was born in Jamaica. I’ll go through the evidence.

The 18-year-old Levy first arrived in the United States on August 22, 1918, on board the SS Santa Elena. On the passenger list his nationality is listed as “BWI” (British West Indies), and his permanent residence as Balboa, Panama. His nearest relative is his mother, Theodosia Foreman, of Ancón, Panama Canal Zone. His birth place is listed as “D.W.I. Jamaica.” (“D.W.I.” is probably a mistake for “B.W.I.”

 

Less than a month later Levy registered for the World War I draft. On the card he is identified as a British citizen. He was working for the Submarine Boat Corporation at the Newark Bay Shipyard.

He appears in the 1920 census (enumerated in January) living in Manhattan and working as a chauffeur for a private family. His birth place (and that of his parents) is listed as Panama. He may at this point already have been a student at City College. George Palmer, writing in 1947, described his early years in this country, calling him “Oscar Levy, better known as ‘Chick’ of Chick’s Bar and Grill, up at 145th St. and 7th Ave.”:

Chick, a Panama-born baseball player of not so long ago, is well known in the community. He played ball 18 years with the Cuban Stars before his retirement in 1938, He lived in Cuba for a long period and claims he holds several records in Cuba which still stand. He got into baseball quite unintentionally. While a second year student attending City College he went out to Philadelphia for a tryout. The tryout lasted 18 years. He found ball playing lots of fun and made a good living out of it. (New York Amsterdam News, December 13, 1947, p. 26.)

He joined Alex Pompez’s eastern Cuban Stars in 1921, and played ball in Cuba every winter for years, beginning with Almendares in the 1922/23 winter season. Upon his return to the U.S. with Pompez’s team in April 1924, he appears as “Oscar Levis” in the passenger list, the earliest mention I’ve seen of the “Levis” name in official documents.

By June 1925, when he appears in the New York State Census, he is married, and still listed as a chauffeur rather than baseball player. He also gives his name as “Levis.” In the same month, while in Atlantic City with the Cuban Stars, he mailed the following postcard to a writer at a Cuban newspaper, signing himself “Levis”:

In 1926, he petitioned to become a naturalized citizen, under his legal name (Levy). His application gives his birthdate as August 7, 1899, in “Jamaica BWI,” and confirms his arrival in the U.S. in 1918 aboard the Santa Elena. He renounces his allegiance to George V, “King of Gt. Britain & Ireland.” Levy’s occupation is given as chauffeur—but his witnesses are Nathaniel C. Strong and Max Rosner, both baseball promoters who controlled booking for the Cuban Stars (and would later own the Cuban Stars club Levis managed in the 1930s).

 

A few years later, in the 1930 census, he is listed as Oscar Levis (wrongly transcribed at both Ancestry.com and Family Search as “Oscar Lewis”), born in the British West Indies, and his occupation is (finally) listed as “ball player, Baseball team.” Under “naturalization” the census form says “No” for Levis. This could be a mistake—or maybe, for some reason, his petition for naturalization was denied.

In the 1940 census he is Oscar J. Levy, restaurant manager, born in Jamaica BWI…but his citizenship is given as “Pa,” presumably Panamanian.

Lastly, his death certificate lists his birthplace as “West Indies”:

Oscar Levy’s parents were Amos Levy and Theodosia Foreman. I haven’t been able to track anything down about his father, but his mother was mentioned on Oscar’s World War I draft card (above), and she traveled to the U.S. in 1936. She was visiting her son, who’s listed as her contact on the passenger list—which also gives her birth place: Jack’s River, Kingston, Jamaica, as well as her mother’s name (Mrs. Susan Norris of Jamaica). It’s a bit unclear where this “Jack’s River” is located. There are places named Jacks River in St. Mary Parish, north of Kingston (and adjacent to it). I haven’t found a record of Oscar’s birth or any other, more specific information about it.

 

A few other Negro league figures were connected to the English-speaking Caribbean, but not many. Alexander McDonald Williams, the co-founder and owner of the Negro National League’s Pittsburgh Keystones and builder of the Hill District’s Central Baseball Park, was an immigrant from Barbados. Alphonso Gerard, a 1940s outfielder, was born in 1917 in what used to be the Danish West Indies, just a couple of months after it became part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The 1920s Royal Giants outfielder Irvin Brooks was long thought to have been from the Bahamas. He was really born in Key West, Florida, but his family probably did have Caribbean connections.

A handful of major league ballplayers were born in Jamaica, most notably Chili Davis and Devon White. While it seems likely that he grew up in Panama, Oscar Levis is (so far) the only Negro leaguer known to have been born in Jamaica.

UPDATE 2:56pm: Thanks to commenter JohnR, I was able to find Oscar’s birth registration in Jamaica. He was born on August 7, 1898 (rather than 1899), in Oracabessa in St. Mary Parish.

Inside Sprudel Park

The West Baden Sprudels, a black professional team managed for four years by the great C. I. Taylor and starring such players as Dizzy Dismukes, George Shively, and C. I.’s brothers Ben and Candy Jim, played their home games in Sprudel Park. This was an amazing structure, part of the luxury West Baden Springs Hotel complex, that consisted of a baseball field circled by an enclosed, elevated bicycle track, with the hotel’s dome—the largest freestanding dome in the Western Hemisphere—looming in the background.

Kevin Pope has been able to collect some photographs and other materials related to the Sprudels. Among these items is the following postcard, showing the Sprudels inside the park sometime from 1910 through 1913:

 

The postcard is unfortunately too blurry to identify anybody for sure, although I will guess that the guy kneeling in the center with the collie mascot is C. I. Taylor. He appeared in this 1920 photo of the Indianapolis ABCs in a very similar posture (albeit without a dog):

Kevin has also dug up some ledger pages with some player names and salaries. Here’s one page from 1911:

I can confirm that a couple of these guys did indeed appear for the Sprudels in 1911: Luther O’Neal (catcher) and Sutton (no first name, first base). The others could include Albert Toney, Big Jim Norman, Leonard or Roland Griffin, W. Higbee, Hub Alexander, and Lou Oliver, all players around this time for the French Lick Plutos (the Sprudels’ archrivals), Indianapolis ABCs (C. I. Taylor’s next team), Birmingham Giants (Taylor’s previous team), or Chicago Union Giants. The $30 or $40 paid to everybody but “Griffen” sound like a week’s or maybe a month’s pay; Griffen’s $3 must be for one game.

In addition, Kevin has a much later version of the French Lick Plutos, the 1931 “Pluto Red Devils of French Lick and West Baden”:

The ’31 Pluto Red Devils were themselves probably not a top drawer professional club, but they did play the Louisville White Sox of the Negro National League:

(Louisville Courier-Journal, May 31, 1931, p. 39)

And Kevin has also run across some photos of a black fraternal organization from the same area, ca. 1910, perhaps showing some of the men associated with the ball club (though I don’t recognize anyone):