Agate Type

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.

 

 

 

Andrew Williams, Right Field, 1918

Last fall Brian Campf acquired this postcard:

At first you might think that the identity of this player is obvious. There was an Andrew Williams, a pitcher who sometimes played in the outfield, who was active in 1918. That would be the player more commonly known as “String Bean” Williams, a right-hander for a number of teams in the 1910s and 1920s. In a way he was a kind of prototype for Satchel Paige: a lanky, have-glove-will-travel moundsman who was reputed to be quite advanced in age even during his prime. (While I have some leads, I’ve never been able to pin him down for sure in historical records or figure out how old he was.) Of course, as a pitcher String Bean was pretty good, but not nearly in the same class as Paige.

Anyway, the thing about String Bean Williams is that we know what he looked like. Here are various images of him, dating from 1911 to 1921:

To my eyes, this is very clearly a different person from the Andrew Williams on Brian’s postcard. Their chins are quite different, for example, as well as their eyebrows, noses, and, perhaps, complexions (though this last is sometimes hard to tell in old photographs, as lighting and angle can make a huge difference).

Williams is a common name, and there are several players named Williams in black professional baseball circa 1920. Most interestingly for us, Baseball-Reference.com lists a player called Andrew “Red” Williams playing for the Bacharach Giants in 1922 and the Indianapolis ABCs in 1924. In fact, though, the 1922 Bacharachs player is none other than String Bean himself, while the 1924 player is an infielder from the west coast named Adams Williams, nicknamed “Black Cat” (I personally haven’t found him called “Red” anywhere). Nevertheless, it’s possible there was an Andrew “Red” Williams active around that time—it’s just that he was wrongly attached to the 1922 and 1924 records. And maybe this other Andrew Williams, wherever he actually played, is the guy in Brian’s photo. But at this point it’s anybody’s guess. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know.

los eternos rivales

James Tate sent me this photo a while back (almost two years ago, actually). I was able to confirm for him that the Almendares player on the right was definitely the father of Omara Portuondo. But the guy on the left (probably an Habana player), trying to crack him up? I had no idea.

Now I see that this Telemundo photo gallery has identified the jokester as Bienvenido Jiménez. Can’t say I’ve ever heard much about “Hooks” Jiménez as a person, so this gives us a welcome glimpse of an early player as something other than a blurry face or a name in a box score.

chicago union giants, undated broadside

The 1911 Chicago Union Giants panoramic postcard that Brian Campf sent me recently reminds of another fantastic Union Giants image, this one a broadside shown to me by Jason Miller last year. I was going to post it then, but other things got in the way, and I never got around to it. So, with apologies to Jason, here it is at last:

On the bottom it says “Will Play at Rockford July 8.” That could refer to Rockford, Illinois, where the Union Giants regularly played circa 1910-1911, although I haven’t found a Union Giants game reported on exactly that date during those years. (It might also refer to other Rockfords, such as the one in Minnesota or the one in Michigan.)

Here’s a detail of the team:



Jason was unsure of the exact year of the broadside and the identities of the players, and I couldn’t help him much at the time. But comparison with Brian’s postcard, which has been definitively dated to September 6, 1911, shows that several of the same players appear in both—so Jason’s broadside must date from sometime around 1911, though maybe not that year precisely. Here are the ones whose identity we can be pretty sure of (1911 postcard on left, undated broadside on right):

Bob Gilkerson, who played for the Union Giants from 1909 to 1916 (in 1917 he founded the Lost Island Giants, and in 1919 Gilkerson’s Union Giants). He was captain of the Union Giants in 1911 and 1912.

Horace Jenkins, Union Giants 1910-1914

Sam Gordon, Union Giants 1909 to 1912 (late in 1912 he joined the French Lick Plutos, and in 1913 he became their manager).

Lefty Harvey, Union Giants 1910-1912

The presence of Jenkins and Harvey in the broadside would narrow down its date to 1910 to 1912.

Of the other players we’ve identified in Brian’s postcard, Albert Toney and Haywood Rose seem to have played for the Union Giants only in 1911 (Rose is listed on a Union Giants roster once in 1912, but I haven’t found a box score showing him playing for the team.) Neither of them seems (to me) to be in Jason’s broadside—which would be an indication that the broadside might date from 1910 and 1912, but probably not 1911. (Although Toney joined the team partway through the 1911 season.)

There are four players who probably appear on Brian’s 1911 postcard who aren’t matched to a specific face:

Guy Jackson, Union Giants 1910-1911
Mack Ramsey, Union Giants 1909-1917
Ed Lee, Union Giants 1910-1911
Hub Alexander, Union Giants 1911-1914

At least two of these still-unidentified players are also on the 1910-1912 broadside (again, 1911 postcard on left, undated broadside on right):

Lee, Ramsey, and Jackson all appeared for the Union Giants in 1910, but not Alexander (as far as I know); Guy Jackson and Ed Lee didn’t play for the Union Giants in 1912, but Ramsey and Alexander did. Given that two of these four appear in the broadside, that would seem to be an indication that the broadside dates from 1912, as the 1912 Union Giants shared only two of these players with the 1911 edition, while the 1910 Union Giants had three of them. If the broadside shows the 1912 team, then the two players pictured above might be Ramsey and Alexander, though which is which is still unknown.

I might also have a line on one of the unknown players in Jason’s 1910-1912 broadside, a player holding a catcher’s mitt (at right).

In 1910 and 1911 Gordon and Washington caught for the Union Giants; in 1910 there’s a third one, usually identified in the box scores as “B. Jones” (to distinguish him from outfielder Willis Jones). (I haven’t found his first name yet.)

And the 1912 Union Giants also used a third catcher. An article by Bob Gilkerson in the March 16, 1912, issue of The Freeman (Indianapolis), mentions the presence of “Armstroad [sic], the St. Paul Gophers’ reliable catcher,” who “will help old warhorse Gordon to cut off the men from pilfering bases.” He’s referring to George “Mule” Armstrong, who did indeed catch for the Union Giants that season.  Here’s a comparison of the unidentified player with the catcher’s mitt from Jason’s broadside (on the left) with the only two photos I have of Mule Armstrong (on the right).

The catcher in the broadside looks intriguingly similar to the first picture of Armstrong (in the middle), but not so much to the second one, and in any case the eyebrows are a problem, in my opinion.

If Armstrong is in the broadside, that would be a very solid reason to think that it dates from 1912 rather than 1910—but I can’t go there just yet. Careful work might just tell us for sure, and might also help to sort out the unidentified players on Brian’s 1911 postcard.

Lastly, there’s one player I can identify in Jason’s broadside who is not in Brian’s 1911 postcard.

 

This is, I believe, a catcher named William Washington. The picture of Washington on the right is from this 1908 postcard of the Union Giants, which is also from Brian Campf. Washington played for the Union Giants earlier in 1911, but was apparently not with the team in the Upper Peninsula in September. He was also with the team for part of 1912. So his presence in the broadside is not inconsistent with either 1910 or 1912.

chicago union giants, 1911

Check out this amazing panoramic postcard from Brian Campf:

This was taken in the town of Daggett, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on September 6, 1911, the day of a game between W. S. Peters’s Chicago Union Giants and the local Daggett team. The Union Giants are the ten players on the right.

Thanks to some detective work by Brian, Todd Peterson, Larry Lester, and myself, we’ve identified six of the ten Union Giants. Here’s the box score for the Daggett game, which Brian obtained from the Menominee County Library:

This gives us nine of the Union Giants players. What about the tenth? The Union Giants played a doubleheader in Escanaba, Michigan, two days earlier, on Labor Day (September 4, 1911). Here are the box scores (courtesy of Todd):

 

(Escanaba Morning Press, September 6, 1911, p.8)

Here we have the same nine players as in Daggett, plus a tenth: the pitcher Hub Alexander. To return to Brian’s postcard:

 

In order, from left to right:

1) Robert Gilkerson, the Union Giants’ captain and second baseman

2) Sam Gordon, the Union Giants’ manager and catcher

3) Horace Jenkins, outfielder/pitcher

4) (unknown)

5) (unknown)

6) (unknown)

7) Haywood “Kissing Bug” Rose, catcher / first baseman

8) (unknown)

9) Albert Toney, shortstop

10) Lefty Harvey, pitcher/outfielder

There remain four players whose faces we can’t match to names (4, 5, 6, and 8): Ed Lee (outfielder), Guy Jackson (third baseman), Mack Ramsey (outfielder), and (possibly) Hub Alexander (pitcher). If anybody has any ideas about which is which, let me know.

1904 philadelphia giants

Just wanted to point out this beautiful image of the 1904 Philadelphia Giants, which John Thorn has posted at least a couple of times (most recently in this entry on Sol White).

To my knowledge, the photograph was first published in the September 2, 1904, issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer (though one wonders if it didn’t first appear in the pages of The Item, the paper that employed the Giants’ owner Walter Schlichter).

Since when I originally noticed this photograph much of my interest came from its status as the earliest known photograph of Pete Hill, here’s a closeup of him:

And here are a few more, starting with Rube Foster:

Bill Monroe:

Johnny Hill:

 

Charlie Grant:

 

Will Horn:

 

Andrew Payne:

asheville royal giants

In the comments to this post I remarked that I’d never seen a photo of the Asheville Royal Giants. Thanks to Mark Aubrey, now I have. Here they are:

You can see more photos in Bill Ballew’s book, Baseball in Asheville. Edward W. Pearson, a Spanish-American War veteran and businessman, founded the Royal Giants around 1916, and they continued to play into the 1920s, joining the Blue Ridge Colored Baseball League in 1921. For more about the team, Mark points to an article by Bijan Bayne about “Early Black Baseball in North Carolina” (pdf).

Here’s something else Mark found out about the Royal Giants:

(Charleston Evening Post, August 26, 1922)

It seems likely that this is Forrest “Wing” Maddox of the 1921 Knoxville Giants and the 1923 Birmingham Black Barons.

willie wells and the 1943 alijadores de tampico

Brian Campf sent me this postcard of the Alijadores (Lightermen) de Tampico of the 1943 Mexican League, featuring Willie Wells as player-manager (standing at the far left). Notable members of the team included the Mexican first baseman Àngel Castro, the Cuban outfielder Pedro Formental, and Negro league pitchers Berthum Hunter and Henry McHenry.

The team didn’t fare that well, unfortunately. The 37-year-old Wells did what he could, batting .295, and Formental (.312, 63 walks in 90 games) and McHenry (17-10 for both Tampico and Mexico City’s Red Devils) contributed; but Castro, probably the top slugger of the Mexican League’s early years, slumped to .248 with only nine homers, and Hunter won a grand total of three games for three different teams that summer. Wells was replaced as manager by Santos Amaro before the season was over, and Los Alijadores finished in fourth place with a 41-48 record.

Here’s a closeup of Wells:

And here are a couple of Formental photos, also from Brian, one of them signed:

Thanks to Brian for these great images!

the santop montage

Hake’s has put up for auction a rather amazing piece from the Richard Merkin collection.  It’s astonishing, a one of a kind artifact: a montage of numerous photos of Negro league players from the 1910s, many of them images I’ve never seen before, including some fairly obscure players.  It’s dominated by pictures of Louis Santop (14 individual images in all, not counting the team photos). 

The montage’s history seems completely unknown; Hake’s speculates that it was perhaps made for Santop himself.  At the top and bottom are a number of team photos; the center is filled with photos of individual players, many from Palm Beach, Florida, winter baseball in the mid-1910s.  There are also a number of players in Indianapolis ABCs uniforms, which might also be from one of the team’s sojourns in Florida.

Here are some of the highlights (for me, anyway).

Lee Wade with mascot; Ashby Dunbar.

Bill Pettus.

The “Female Giants,” Florida 1913.  The players are wearing both Royal Poinciana and Brooklyn (Royal Giants?) jerseys.

Some of the Santop images.

1911 St. Louis Giants. 

It’s hard to tell, but I think  the two guys seated in the front might be Eugene Moore (on the left) and Joe Hewitt (on the right); Steel Arm Johnny Taylor might be seated in the middle, second from left; and Ben Taylor might be standing, second from left.

 

Leroy Grant, Louis Santop, Joe Hewitt, John Henry Lloyd; bottom left is catcher Burlin White; bottom center Bill Gatewood pitching.

I would love to see a large, high-resolution image of this montage printed on a fold-out sheet in a coffee-table book.  Come to think of it, I’d like to see a well-designed Negro league coffee table book, period.  There are a number of smaller books of photos, particularly the fine Black Baseball in… series, with volumes on Kansas City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.  But possibly the only publication that really qualifies as a Negro league coffee-table book would be Phil Dixon’s The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History—and that is, I believe, out of print. There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of great images that are scattered around in other books, on the internet, and in collections.

UPDATE 5:04 p.m. I should also mention Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball, by Mark Rucker and Peter Bjarkman, which is another of my favorite books of photographs.

fred long

Fred Long was a Detroit Stars outfielder in the early 1920s who went on to become a legendary college football coach.  I had never seen a photograph of Long, but recently ran across this in a July 10, 1948, story about Long in the Chicago Defender:
 


Then I checked this very familiar photograph of the 1920 Detroit Stars, in which several players remain unidentified:



In some books, the middle player in the back row is identified as Charles “Chick” Harper:



I don’t think I have any other photos of Harper, so it’s impossible for me to say.  But that player, to my mind, looks an awful lot like Long:


UPDATE 4:44 p.m.  Here’s a photo of Fred Long in 1918, as a student at Millikin University in his hometown of Decatur, Illinois (from the Chicago Defender Digital Edition, 2010):

UPDATE 12/7/2012 In the comments Badgerhistory links to a fantastic photograph of the Millikin football team in 1916, with Fred Long in the middle of the front row: