Agate Type

mohawk park

Here’s another entry in the list of ballparks built especially for Negro league teams, joining Central Baseball Park and Greenlee Field (Pittsburgh), Giants Park and Stars Park (St. Louis), Lewis Park (Memphis), and Tate Field (Cleveland), among others. After playing a season at Island Park, a once and future semipro venue located on Van Slyck Island in the Mohawk River, the Schenectady Mohawk Giants were taken over in 1914 by a local businessman named Samuel R. Flansburgh. He determined to build the Mohawks their own park in Rotterdam, just beyond Schenectady’s southern boundary, at the end of the Broadway trolley line.

(Schenectady Gazette, March 25, 1914, p. 12)

Work was completed by the end of April, and Mohawk Park was opened on Saturday, May 2, by a game between the Mohawks and a new club, the New York Colored Giants. The Mohawks crushed them 17 to 0, and then followed up with a more restrained 10 to 2 victory on Sunday. Unfortunately this would be the last major black club to visit Schenectady in 1914, a marked contrast with 1913, which saw the Paterson Smart Set, New York Lincoln Giants, Philadelphia Giants, Brooklyn Royal Giants, and Cuban Giants of Buffalo all visit Island Park. Forced into a long road trip to find opponents, the Mohawks hemorrhaged money and finally fell apart in August.

(Schenectady Gazette, August 11, 1914, p. 7)

It turns out that the Mohawks’ troubles may have been caused by the Schenectady County sheriff, Louis A. Welch, who was determined to stop Sunday baseball at Mohawk Park. After the season Flansburgh actually sued Welch (unsuccessfully) for damaging his business.

(Schenectady Gazette, November 11, 1914, p. 12)

Flansburgh lost his lease on Mohawk Park the following year, but the ballpark continued to exist for a number of years, renamed Electric City Park, after the larger amusement complex on whose grounds it had been built.

jim eschen, 1913 all-americans

Jack Morris writes about the Frank Wickware/Walter Johnson contest in 1913:

“I think the Eshen listed in the boxscore for the All-Americans is Jim Eschen, who would eventually play 10 games for the 1915 Cleveland Indians. He was an up-and-coming player in 1913. The Yankees had signed him and sent him to Jersey City in the International League where he mostly played left field. 1913 was his rookie year in Organized Baseball. According to the December 20, 1913 Sporting Life, he was going to go to camp with the Yankees in Houston for the spring of 1914.”

Also: see Phil Dixon’s book The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History, page 68, for another team photograph of the Schenectady Mohawk Giants, this time without the plaid jackets so you can see what their uniforms looked like.

red ant, big train

If you remember anything about Frank Wickware and his 1913 team the Schenectady Mohawk Giants it’s likely to be Wickware’s 1 to 0 defeat of Walter Johnson in an exhibition game on October 5 of that year.  This was Walter Johnson at the height of his powers, the year he went 36-7 for the Washington Senators with a 1.14 ERA.  Both Wickware and Johnson were born only a few months apart (Johnson on November 6. 1887, Wickware on March 18, 1888) in the southeast corner of Kansas; both were often linked to Coffeyville, though Johnson was born and grew up outside of Humboldt, while it appears that Wickware was from Girard, though he may later have moved to Coffeyville.

   
    
Walter Johnson and Frank Wickware.  Note that Wickware is called “Smoky Joe” Wickware by the Schenectady Gazette in 1913, several years before the nickname was attached to Cyclone Joe Williams (who, incidentally, started the year with the Mohawks).

The game only went five innings (45 minutes!), perhaps by prior agreement with Johnson, who had just thrown 346 innings in 48 games for the Nationals.  (The Schenectady Gazette said it was called due to darkness.)  His team had been advertised as consisting of American League players (thus, presumably, the moniker “All-Americans”), but I’ve had a hard time tracking them down.  The only ones I know for sure are Fred Jacklitsch, a 38-year-old former Phillies catcher, playing for Rochester of the International League that year, and Paul Dietz, shortstop for Harrisburg of the Tri-State League and later a fixture on the East Coast semipro scene.  It seems safe to say that Johnson was backed by a minor league team—and not a high-level minor league team, either.

Yet Johnson hardly needed them.  He struck out 11 in five innings.  Of his  62 pitches, only nine were called balls, and the All-Americans did not manage a single assist. The Mohawks made only two hits, both ground rule doubles that went over the crowds standing in the outfield, one to left, one to center.  (You have to wonder just how close the fans were standing.)

Wickware, by contrast, was pretty good, but not overpowering.  He fanned five but walked three, allowed five hits (including two to Johnson), and hit a batter.  Still, he succeed in working his way out of trouble, and scraped through with the five-inning win.

Here’s the Schenectady Gazette’s account of the game (October 6, 1913; click to enlarge).

schenectady mohawk giants, 1913

Ran across this photo today, in the Schenectady Gazette (May 2, 1913).  Love the plaid warmup jackets.

 From L to R: William Wernecke (owner), Jesse Bragg, Grant Johnson, Mike Brown, William T. Smith, Cyclone Joe Williams, Leroy Grant, Judy Gans, Phil Bradley (captain), and Johnny Pugh. 

This is just the roster at the beginning of the year; there would be plenty of changes through the season.  Williams, Johnson, and Gans would defect (back) to the Lincoln Giants within a few weeks of this photo; Frank Wickware, Chappie Johnson, Knucks James, and Walter Ball would later join the Mohawks.