Agate Type

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.”)

the georgia rabbit

I’ve long been puzzled by two facts of Walter Ball’s biography: he’s commonly listed in reference books as “George Walter Ball,” and given the nickname “The Georgia Rabbit.”  Both are problematic:

1) I have never seen a contemporary reference to Walter Ball as anything but Walter Ball, and the few official documents I’ve been able to find (passenger lists, census records, draft cards, death certificate) give his name as…Walter Ball.  His World War I draft card gives him a middle name, Thomas.   So, as far as I can tell, his name was Walter Thomas Ball—no George involved.

2) And all sources agree that he was born in Detroit, Michigan, had moved to Minnesota by the time he was 14, and played his entire professional career for Northern teams—so why would he have been called “The Georgia Rabbit”?

After looking into it a little, I found a single reference that I believe explains both of these problems.  It’s a passage from Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, originally published in 1907, toward the very end of the original text (p. 118 in the Jerry Malloy edition):

Here White appears to be calling Ball “George Washington Ball” and giving him the nickname “Georgia Rabbit.”  Okay, fair enough—Sol White, after all, was there, and has to be considered the leading authority on this era, plus the book was published right in the middle of Ball’s career. 

Except for one curious fact: White calls him George Washington Ball, but historians have apparently chosen to interpret “Washington” as a mistake for “Walter.”

Many years later, in 1931, White wrote a piece for the New York Age about the Philadelphia Giants in which he discussed roster changes forced in 1907 by the defection of the team’s biggest star, Rube Foster:

(New York Age, January 3, 1931, p. 6)

So White is saying here that he signed “the Georgia Rabbit” for the Philadelphia Giants.  There’s only one problem with this: Walter Ball never pitched for the Philadelphia Giants.  He did suit up for the 1906 Philadelphia Quaker Giants, a team organized by the McMahon brothers to try to cut in on the Philly Giants’ market, but he never did play for Sol White & Walter Schlichter’s club.  As for 1907, Ball split the year between two Midwestern teams, the new St. Paul Gophers and the Chicago Leland Giants, and spent 1908 with the Lelands and the Minneapolis Keystones.

Also reprinted in Malloy’s edition of the History of Colored Base Ball is an interview of Sol White by Floyd Calvin, which was originally published in the Pittsburgh Courier, March 12, 1927.  Much of it consists of a chronological account of White’s career.  Here’s the entry for 1907 (from the original version in the Courier), again about new players on the Philadelphia Giants that year:

(Pittsburgh Courier, March 12, 1927, p. A4)

Taken literally, this seems to imply that White signed a pitcher named George Washington (not “George Washington Ball”) along with someone else called “G. A. Rabbit.” 

No one named “Rabbit” ever appeared in a Philadelphia Giants’ box score, to my knowledge.  There was, on the other hand, a pitcher named George Washington on Sol White’s team in 1907 and 1908.  He didn’t pitch against any black professional teams in 1907, so he doesn’t appear in the Seamheads DB for that year, but he was with the Giants—for example:

(Philadelphia Inquirer, June 14, 1907)

It’s my opinion that “George Walter Ball, the Georgia Rabbit” was born as a result of a lost comma in Sol White’s book. 

White was listing pitchers by last name until he got to George Washington, not as well-known as the others.  What he meant to write was “McClellan, Bowman, Foster, Holland, Merritt, George Washington (Georgia Rabbit), Ball, Wilson, Davis and Buckner,” but by some mishap the comma after “(Georgia Rabbit)” was omitted, making it look like he was talking about somebody named George Washington Ball, nicknamed Georgia Rabbit.  This was, by pure coincidence, compounded by another punctuation mishap 20 years later, the next time (as far as I know) White talked publicly about Washington.  Floyd Calvin misread White’s or his own notes, and where White meant to say “George Washington (pitcher, Georgia Rabbit),” Calvin misunderstood it as a separate player named “G. A. Rabbit.”

I don’t know very much about George Washington, but what little I do know includes two facts that seem very relevant here.  1) Unlike Walter Ball, George Washington was from Georgia—he was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1874.  And 2), Washington may also have played for the baseball team organized by the Rabbit’s Foot Company, a famous minstrel troupe.

So in the end there’s no reason to think that Walter Ball’s first name was George or that he was ever called “the Georgia Rabbit,” and several good reasons to think that another player’s first name and nickname have been accidentally attached to Ball.

UPDATE See also this 1926 interview with Rube Foster where he confirms the separate existence of a Philadelphia Giants player named “Georgia Rabbit Washington.”

habana’s american players, 1911

On November 19, 1911, six African American baseball players arrived in Havana, Cuba, to play for the newly re-organized Habana Base Ball Club.  They posed for this photograph, printed in the Havana newspaper El Mundo on November 20, 1911.

Standing, L to R: Pete Hill, John Henry Lloyd, Grant “Home Run” Johnson, Walter Ball
Seated: Bruce Petway, Cyclone Joe Williams, Bill Pettus.

Although the quality of the image above is quite poor (having been printed, microfilmed, and finally scanned), if anyone ever comes up with an actual print of this photograph, it might turn out to be quite valuable.  You’re looking at a previously unknown (or little-known) image that includes three Hall of Famers plus three other very notable Negro league players.

Of the six players, five actually appeared for Habana during the 1911-12 winter season; the sixth, Walter Ball, returned to the United States on January 16, 1912, not having pitched an inning, as far as I can tell.  Here he is, on the passenger list of the S.S. Chalmette, bound for New Orleans: