Did Bud Fowler Almost Break the Major-League Color Line In 1888?
This article was written by David Kathman
This article was published in The National Pastime: Heart of the Midwest (2023)
Bud Fowler’s election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in December 2021 has brought new attention to this Black baseball pioneer of the nineteenth century. Fowler was one of the first Black players to make a living in so-called “Organized Baseball,” playing for a series of otherwise all-white teams between 1878 and 1895 before helping organize the Page Fence Giants, a pioneering Black professional team, in the 1890s.1 The teams that Fowler played for in his prime were all in circuits such as the Northwestern League, the Illinois-Iowa League, and the Nebraska State League, all minor leagues or independent leagues. He never played in any one place for very long, both because of the financial instability of these leagues, and because of the racism that faced him everywhere he went.
Some tantalizing evidence suggests that in 1888, Fowler was almost signed to a major-league contract by John T. Brush of the Indianapolis Hoosiers (then in the National League), but that racist objections by the Hoosier players sabotaged the idea. This story appears in several modern accounts of Brush’s life, including his Wikipedia entry, but these all ultimately derive from the same source: a typescript in the Giamatti Research Center (GRC) at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.2 According to the typescript (henceforth the “Brush typescript”), the incident happened after the Crawfordsville, Indiana, franchise in the Central Interstate League collapsed. Brush, who “had been keeping his optics closely trained on her star second baseman, a negro—J.W. (Bud) Fowler,” arranged to bring Fowler to Indianapolis (about 50 miles from Crawfordsville) for a tryout. But the Indianapolis roster was full of Irish players whose strong objections caused Brush to drop the plan.3
The typescript is not in Fowler’s file at the GRC, but in the file for Brush, a baseball magnate who began his career in Indianapolis in the 1880s and eventually owned the New York Giants in their glory years of the early 1900s. The 20-page document is apparently a transcription of a handwritten original, consisting of an account of Brush’s early baseball career in Indianapolis, including the Fowler incident. The account was written by Guy M. Smith, whose name appears at the end, and may have been transcribed by sports- writer Dan Daniel, whose name is written in felt-tip pen at the top of the first page. It can be dated between 1937 and 1940 on internal evidence: Smith refers to “the late Harry S. New,” who died May 9, 1937, but refers to Joe Quinn, who died in 1940, as “now a St. Louis mortician.”4 In 1941, Smith said that he had almost finished writing a book called Across the Years in Baseball, and that if he couldn’t afford to get it published, “I’ll just hand along all of my records and data to the Cooperstown shrine.” Presumably this typescript (or the manuscript it is based on) was part of the materials for that never-published book, helping explain how it got to the Hall of Fame.5
At first glance, this does not appear to be a very reliable source: a typed transcription of a lost original, written 50 years after the events it describes. However, there are reasons to take this account seriously, starting with the author, Guy M. Smith. Smith was a very interesting character who was in a good position to know about the events in question. His published writings from the same time period are generally reliable in their broad strokes, if not in every detail, and the same is true of things in the Brush typescript that can be checked against the documentary record. In order to properly evaluate Smith’s account of Brush and Fowler, it will be helpful to explore Smith and his career in some detail.
GUY M. SMITH, INDIANAPOLIS BASEBALL HISTORIAN
Guy McIlvaine Smith was born in Indianapolis on December 2, 1870 (possibly), and grew up there as a rabid baseball fan, around the time of the events described in the typescript.6 Indianapolis nearly always had a professional baseball team during Smith’s youth, including three that briefly achieved major-league status (in 1878, 1884, and 1887-89). Smith regularly attended games and got to know some of the players and executives, especially on the 1887-89 team, of which John T. Brush was president. Smith attended DePauw University and worked as a newspaperman from 1889 to 1895, after which he moved to Danville, Illinois, and took a series of railroad jobs. In 1936 he retired after 34 years as a railroad mail clerk and became a full-time writer, mostly about baseball.7
By the 1930s, Smith had become well-known to sportswriters as a source of information about nineteenth-century baseball, especially if it involved Indianapolis. In 1935 he wrote his first baseball history article for The Sporting News, an obituary of Paul Hines, and over the next decade he wrote frequently for that publication, and occasionally for others. His memory appears to have been quite good well into his seventies, and he also had a formidable library of baseball books and publications. A 1941 profile of Smith in The Sporting News calls him “a veritable encyclopedia of the game,” and says that “if Brother Smith tells you something happened at 4 o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, July 7, 1889, or August 11, 1886, put it down as correct.”8 This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but many of the events Smith describes in his published articles (or in articles that quote him) can be at least partially confirmed in the historical record.
For example, in that 1941 Sporting News profile, Smith recalled how, as a child in 1876, he and his older brother “went to the Indianapolis park, where the famed Chicago White Stockings were to play an Indianapolis team that included such stars as Silver Flint and Mike Golden. Through a hole in the fence, young Guy and his brother saw Al Spalding pitch and Deacon White catch for Chicago.” Indianapolis did not have a National League team in 1876, but in fact the White Stockings did play exhibition games there on July 31 and August 4, 1876, against the local semi-pro team. In both games Silver Flint and Mike Golden played for Indianapolis, and Spalding pitched and Deacon White caught for Chicago.9 The newspaper account of the July 31 game describes the many people who watched the game without paying, including dozens on surrounding rooftops and boys who climbed telegraph poles.10
In that same 1941 profile, Smith recalled seeing Deacon White, now with Cincinnati, catching his brother Will White in 1878 while wearing an improved catcher’s mask he had invented. “As a boy, I saw Deacon wear the mask for the first time that year and it attracted much attention. At the close of the game, White explained its merits to a crowd that had gathered around. Silver Flint, who caught for Indianapolis that day, wore the old rubber face protector.”11 Two games in Indianapolis’s 1878 schedule fit Smith’s description: June 4 and June 6, in both of which Cincinnati was in town, with Deacon White catching and Will White pitching, and Silver Flint catching for Indianapolis.12 Existing (short) biographies of White do not mention the mask story, but it is consistent with what we know. After a decade as a star catcher, White had switched to first base and the outfield in 1877, in order to save his body from the punishing abuse that catchers of the day had to endure. But 1877 was also the year that catcher’s masks began to be widely adopted, and in 1878 White went back to catching full-time.13
Smith wrote most often about the National League team Indianapolis had from 1887 through 1889, with John T. Brush as team president.14 He personally knew Brush and many of the players, and witnessed many of the things he wrote about. For example, Smith wrote a long article about Jack Glasscock, star shortstop of the 1887-89 Hoosiers, for the July 9, 1939, edition of the News-Register of Wheeling, West Virginia (Glasscock’s hometown), in honor of Glasscock’s 80th birthday.15 Smith interviewed Glasscock for the article, which included Glasscock’s opinions on baseball in 1939 as well as Smith’s firsthand recollections of Glasscock’s fielding skill as a shortstop. The 1941 Sporting News profile of Guy Smith cites his 1939 interview with Glasscock and describes how Smith brought out a glove that he said Glasscock had given to him during the 1889 season after replacing it with a new one.
Much of the Brush typescript deals with Indianapolis baseball during the same period (1887-89), and it can be a valuable complement to Smith’s articles, as long as its limitations are kept in mind.16 For example, in his 1935 Sporting News obituary of Paul Hines, Smith wrote about an incident that he witnessed in 1889, when Amos Rusie was a rookie pitcher for the Hoosiers.17 After being sent to the minors for seasoning, Rusie was recalled to the big club in August, by Smith’s account, with his first start coming against Boston. In the third inning, manager Jack Glasscock almost pulled him from the game after the rookie issued a couple of walks, but “Rusie, humiliated by the presence of 200 South Side friends” who had come to watch him pitch, pleaded to be allowed to stay in. Paul Hines came over from first base and convinced Glasscock to keep Rusie in, whereupon “Hines, placing his arm around the youthful hurler, walked back with him to the box. The writer witnessed this act and it was the finest example of graciousness he has ever seen upon the diamond.”
The typescript gives a more detailed account of Rusie’s return to the Hoosiers in August 1889, though without mentioning the Hines anecdote. “Rusie went into action August 20 against Chicago with Ad Gumbert and gave the ‘Ruby One’ a run for his money but lost by ‘one’ run. Three days later he defeated Cleveland with Enoch Bakely—one hundred Grand Avenue rooters cheering him to the skies and his father and mother guests of Brush in the private loge.”18 Rusie’s first start after his return was indeed against Chicago (not Boston, as in the 1935 article), but it was a 12-6 loss on August 21 against Frank Dwyer, not a one-run loss on August 20 against Ad Gumbert (who had pitched on August 19). The typescript is correct that Rusie beat Cleveland in his next start on August 23, though the opposing pitcher was Henry Gruber, not Enoch Bakley (who had pitched the day before).19 This August 23, 1889, game against Cleveland is probably the one where Smith saw Hines comfort Rusie. Rusie did get into trouble in the third inning, but not by issuing two walks; rather, Paul Radford singled, went to second on an error by center fielder Ed Andrews, and scored on two sacrifice hits.20
This tendency to get small details almost right, but not quite, is a notable feature of the Brush typescript. When it came to filling in details that he had not personally witnessed or couldn’t remember, Smith relied on his reference library, which, while impressive for the time, was not always reliable by modern standards. Smith apparently had a list of all the games Amos Rusie had pitched, since he said in 1941 that “by careful checking he had established that Rusie never was taken out of a game for ineffectiveness during his National League career.”21 But this list must have had some mistakes that made their way into the Brush typescript, not surprising given that it had to have been compiled by hand in the days before spreadsheets and easily accessible online newspapers.
THE BRUSH TYPESCRIPT AND BUD FOWLER
With all this as background, we can take a closer look at Guy Smith’s account in the typescript of John T. Brush’s attempt to sign Bud Fowler. Unlike the Rusie material, this story does not appear in any of Smith’s published writings, nor is it described in any contemporary sources that I can find. Even so, it is detailed enough to be worth examining closely. The passage is short enough to quote in full. I have corrected a few obvious typos, but have kept Smith’s run-on writing style intact.
Crawfordsville, Indiana passed up her franchise in the Central Interstate in ’87. Brush had been keeping his optics closely trained on her star second baseman, a negro—J.W. (Bud) Fowler who was a member of the Keokuk Iowa Western League team of ’84 and pastimed there with such later day as D.C. Dugdale, “Mit” Kennedy and Nate Hudson. Brush arranged to bring Fowler to Indianapolis but it so happened that names like Boyle, Cahill, Daily, Denny, McGeachy and Seery formed on the club’s roster and in the minds of Indianapolis ball lovers, as well. A delegation from the foregoing group waited on Brush and informed him that there was positively nothing doing in connection with Fowler and both Brush and the colored star opined that it was best to avoid a collision with the Celtic temperament and Fowler joined Binghamton where he continued to star for several seasons. In 1892 he organized and managed the famous Page Fence Giants who were sponsored by the Page Mfg. Co. of Adrian, Michigan and who traveled the country in their palace on wheels built by the Pullman Co.22
The first two sentences are mostly accurate, except that the dates are off by one year, similar to the discrepancies we saw in Smith’s Amos Rusie story. Bud Fowler played for the Crawfordsville, Indiana, team of the Central Interstate League not in 1887, but in 1888; also, Fowler had starred for Keokuk of the Western League not in 1884, but in 1885. The Keokuk teammates listed by Smith were in fact with the team in 1885, as long as we assume that “Mit” Kennedy is a mistranscription for “Ted” Kennedy. Keokuk’s opening day lineup on April 8, 1885, included Fowler at second base, Dan Dugdale at catcher, and Ted Kennedy pitching; by mid-May, Nat Hudson, who would pitch for the St. Louis Browns the following year, had joined Keokuk as a second pitcher.23
John T. Brush may well have become aware of Bud Fowler in 1885 when the Black star played for Keokuk, and Indianapolis was one of the six founding members of the new Western League. Keokuk was initially an “alliance club,” meaning that they were officially independent but each Western League team agreed to play five games at Keokuk.24 Indianapolis traveled to Keokuk for games on April 30, May 7, and May 8, losing the first one, 12-6, and winning the next two, 10-4 and 8-4.25 Keokuk was admitted as a full member of the Western League in early June after the Omaha club collapsed, but less than two weeks later, the entire league imploded, and the Indianapolis directors sold their franchise and players to Detroit of the National League for a reported $5,000.26 Keokuk tried to continue as an independent team for a few more weeks before finally disbanding in July. Soon afterward, on July 22, 1885, Sporting Life wrote: “Fowler, the crack colored player…is one of the best general players in the country, and if he had a White face he would be playing with the best of them.”27
Three years later, when Brush was president of the Indianapolis franchise in the National League, he and Bud Fowler came into each other’s orbits once again. In the early part of 1888, Fowler played for Crawfordsville, Indiana, in the Central Interstate League, and quickly became the star of the team.29 On May 9, a writer going by “Punch” wrote in Sporting Life: “Fowler is playing a great game at second, and it is a very unusual thing for a ball to get by him. I shall be very much surprised if the ‘coon,’ as he is called, does not have a record equal to any in our League in his position.”29 Under the circumstances, it makes sense that Brush would “have his optics closely trained on” Fowler, as Smith wrote. Crawfordsville was only about 50 miles northwest of Indianapolis, with a rail line connecting the two. More significantly, one of the Hoosier players in 1888, Otto Schomberg, had been Fowler’s teammate at Stillwater, Minnesota, in 1884 and at Keokuk in 1885, and could have alerted Brush to Fowler.30
The Central Interstate League of 1888, like the Western League of 1885, was unstable due to financial difficulties. The Crawfordsville franchise moved to Terre Haute In early July, then disbanded on the morning of Monday, July 23, after which the players became free agents.31 That same day, Indianapolis was at home to open a three-game series against the Chicago White Stockings. The Indianapolis News reported Terre Haute’s demise in a small item on its front page on that evening.32 Brush could have read this item or a similar one and telegraphed Fowler an offer, intending to bring him with the team on the road trip they were due to depart for on July 25 if a deal was reached. Of course, this did not happen. On Wednesday, July 25, Fowler was in Terre Haute playing in a benefit game against a “picked nine” to raise money for the players, and two days later the Terre Haute Express was reporting that he had secured a position with Santa Fe, New Mexico.33
THE COLOR LINE IN 1888
According to Guy Smith’s account, racism by the team’s many Irish players was the reason Brush did not sign Fowler. This would not be surprising, given that the color line in the affiliated professional leagues was in the process of being drawn at this time. Numerous Black players had played on minor league teams over the previous few years, but a racist backlash had made it increasingly difficult for White teams to hire them. In 1887 more than a dozen Black players had played on affiliated minor league teams, including Bud Fowler, who played for Binghamton in the International Association. He put up outstanding numbers, batting .350 in 34 games with 30 stolen bases, but he and his Black teammate William Renfro faced relentless racism. In late June, nine White Binghamton players signed a petition refusing to play with Fowler and Renfro, just after two teammates had quit the team for the same reason. Fowler resigned from the team and eventually joined Montpelier in the Northeastern League.34
The most famous incident in the drawing of baseball’s color line happened shortly after Fowler’s resignation from Binghamton. Before the 1887 season, Newark (also in the International Association) had signed a Black battery, pitcher George Stovey and catcher Fleet Walker, who were quite successful. Stovey would win more than 30 games for Newark that year, while Walker was a top-notch catcher who is best known today as the first openly Black player in a segregated major league, playing in 1884 with Toledo in the American Association. (William Edward White, who had a White father and a Black mother, played in one game for the National League’s Providence Grays in 1879, but he “passed” as White.)35 On July 14, 1887, Newark was scheduled to play an exhibition game against Cap Anson and the Chicago White Stockings, but Anson announced that his team would not take the field if Stovey pitched. He had tried this tactic in 1883 when Walker was with Toledo, but Toledo had not backed down, and Walker played in the game (in right field). By 1887, though, the tide was turning, and Stovey did not play against the White Stockings, ostensibly because he was not feeling well. The same day, the International Association directors met to discuss “the question of colored players,” and decided that no more Black players could sign contracts to play in the league, though existing contracts would be honored.36
Before this infamous incident, Cap Anson had already derailed two attempts by the New York Giants to sign George Stovey. In 1886 Stovey was pitching for Jersey City in the Eastern League and doing an excellent job, compiling a 16-15 record with a 1.13 ERA despite deliberately poor support from some of his teammates.37 The September 8, 1886, Sporting Life reported: “New York has been seriously considering the engagement of Stovey, Jersey City’s fine colored pitcher. The question is would the League permit his appearance in League championship games?”38 Manager Pat Powers recalled several years later that the Giants were in a pennant race with Chicago at the time, and that team executive Walter Appleton wanted Stovey to join the Giants for a crucial four-game series in Chicago. “In fact, a deal was fixed between Appleton, the Jersey club, and Stovey to this end. Stovey had his grip packed and awaited the word, but he was not called owing to the fact that Anson had refused to play in a game with colored catcher Walker at Toledo and the same result was feared.”39
On April 7, 1887, the Giants played a preseason exhibition against Newark, for whom George Stovey and Fleet Walker were now playing. The Giants won in a squeaker, 3-2, with Hall of Famer Tim Keefe barely outdueling Stovey, and Walker threw out New York captain John Montgomery Ward trying to steal.40 The Giants were so impressed that the Newark Daily Journal reported on April 9 that New York manager Jim Mutrie had offered to buy the contracts of Stovey and Walker from Newark, but that “Manager Hackett informed him they were not on sale.”41 Twenty years later Sol White, a historian of early Black baseball, gave a fuller and slightly different version of the story. According to White, it was Ward who wanted to sign Stovey, “and arrangements were just about completed for his transfer from the Newark club, when a brawl was heard from Chicago to New York. The same Anson, with all the venom of hate which would be worthy of a Tillman or Vardaman of the present day, made strenuous and fruitful opposition to any proposition looking to the admittance of a colored man into the National League.”42
Given this history, it may not be a coincidence that Anson and his White Stockings were in Indianapolis at the same time that John T. Brush was (apparently) thinking about signing Bud Fowler in late July 1888. This is not to say that Brush’s plan would have succeeded if Anson had not been in town, but his presence nearby could have been a factor in the way things played out (as described by Guy Smith). As Sol White later wrote, “[Anson’s] repugnant feeling, shown at every opportunity, toward colored ball players, was a source of comment through every league in the country, and his opposition, with his great popularity and power in base ball circles, hastened the exclusion to the Black man from the White leagues.”43
Later in 1888 Anson again refused to play against Fleet Walker, who was now the popular starting catcher for the Syracuse Stars. When the team was celebrated at a banquet on September 22 after winning the International Association pennant, Sporting Life reported that “Catcher Moses Walker, of the Star team, returned thanks to the directors and citizens on behalf of himself and fellow players and everybody was happy.”44 However, when Anson and the White Stockings stopped in Syracuse for an exhibition game on September 27, Anson refused to let his team play if Walker was in the lineup. The team caved, no doubt fearful of losing the gate receipts (a large crowd of 4,000 was on hand), and Chicago won the game, 3-0.45 We only know about Anson’s demands from a couple of African-American newspapers, the Indianapolis World and the New York Age. Apparently, behavior like Anson’s had become so normalized by this time, and the color line so established, that the White press saw no need to mention it.46 This may also be one reason why no newspapers mentioned the Brush-Fowler incident at the time, leaving it to Guy Smith to describe it decades later.
A handful of Black players hung on in the minor leagues for a few years after 1888, but they continued to face enormous obstacles. Fleet Walker returned to Syracuse in 1889, but he was released in August and retired.47 Bud Fowler and George Stovey played for integrated minor league teams in 1889 and 1890, but after that, such opportunities almost entirely dried up, as the color line became entrenched throughout the minor leagues. Stovey played for the Cuban Giants and other all-Black teams until his retirement in 1897.48 Fowler managed to play partial seasons in two minor leagues that briefly integrated, the Nebraska State League (1892) and the Michigan State League (1895), but his major achievements were as an organizer, owner, and manager of Black baseball teams, most notably the Page Fence Giants.49 It is primarily thanks to this work as a pioneering organizer of Black baseball that Fowler was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Did John T. Brush almost sign Bud Fowler to a National League contract in 1888? The answer depends on how much we trust the Brush typescript and its author, Guy M. Smith. The evidence laid out in the preceding pages shows that Smith was quite a reliable witness, albeit one prone to confusing minor details. Although the typescript (or the manuscript underlying it) was written about fifty years after the events it describes, Smith retained a sharp memory, such that many of his eyewitness accounts can be confirmed by the documentary record. Furthermore, although his account of Brush and Fowler has some minor errors, it meshes remarkably well with the events of one specific week in central Indiana in late July 1888, when Fowler’s Terre Haute team folded just as Brush and his Hoosiers were preparing to leave on a long road trip. More broadly, the story is consistent with the state of race relations in professional baseball in the summer of 1888, when some Black players remained but the color line was rapidly being established.
If we accept that Smith’s account is accurate at its core, how much does it matter? Even if Brush had somehow succeeded in his plan, and Fowler had played in at least one major league game, the forces that were excluding Black players from all of affiliated baseball would undoubtedly have continued. Fowler might have joined William Edward White, Bumpus Jones, Fleet Walker, and Fleet’s brother Welday as Black players who played major league baseball in the late 1800s, but the color line would have still been established. Even if that’s the case, however, the Brush-Fowler incident is worth having as part of the historical record. It adds another piece to the story of how baseball’s color line came about, and it provides an important detail for the biographies of both Brush and Fowler, two men who were both baseball pioneers in their own ways.
DAVID KATHMAN lives in Mount Prospect, Illinois, with his wife, stepdaughter, and three dogs, and works in Chicago as a mutual fund analyst for Morningstar. He has a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Chicago, and over the past 30 years he has written many scholarly articles on linguistics, Shakespeare, Elizabethan theater history, and nineteenth-century baseball history.
Notes
1. Jeffrey Michael Laing, Bud Fowler: Baseball’s First Black Professional (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013).
2. Guy M. Smith, “John T. Brush,” typescript in the John T. Brush file at the Giamatti Research Center in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York, pp. 5-6. Brush’s Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Brush; accessed September 10, 2022) does not have a specific citation for the Fowler story, but among the sources it lists is Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia (2000), which also includes the story in its entry on Brush (138-9). That book does not include source citations, but it is apparent that one of its main sources for Brush was Richard R. Johnson’s “The Forgotten Indiana Architect of Baseball,” in the May 4, 1975, Indianapolis Star Magazine. This article uses the Guy M. Smith typescript as a primary source, supplemented with the reminiscences of Brush’s younger daughter Natalie.
3. The typescript actually has “colfesion” where my quotation says “collision;” this is one of many obvious mistranscriptions in the typescript, which I have silently corrected here and elsewhere.
4. Smith, “John T. Brush,” 4, 6. Harry S. New was later a US Senator from Indiana and US Postmaster General.
5. Dick Farrington, “Guy Smith, Diamond Historian, Keeps Young By Romancing of Game’s Early Days,” The Sporting News, May 1, 1941, 5.
6. Farrington, “Guy Smith,” gives his birthdate as December 2, 1870, but various census data disagree. The 1880 census lists him as seven years old, while in the 1900 U.S. Census he gave his birthdate as December 1869.
10. “Chicago vs. Indianapolis,” Indianapolis News, August 1, 1876, 1; “Chicago vs. Indianapolis,” Indianapolis News, August 5, 1876, 4.
11. Farrington, “Guy Smith.” According to Smith, “Deacon White, following the close of the 1877 season, worked out a blueprint for an improved mask and took it to a Boston wire worker, who fashioned a mask very much like the one in use today.”
12. “Nolan’s Day,” Indianapolis News, June 5, 1878, 1; “White Wins,” Indianapolis News, June 7, 1878, 4. Indianapolis also played home games against Cincinnati on June 26, 27, 28, and 29, but Flint played left field in those games, and with manager John Clapp at catcher.
13. Peter Morris, Catcher (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 123-27.
14. Technically, Brush did not become team president until July 1, 1887, after a scandal that led to the resignation of the previous president, Louis Newberger. See David Kathman, “John T. Brush: The Early Years, 1845-1888,” Base Ball: New Research on the Early Game 11 (2019), 118-39.
15. Guy M. Smith, “Play of Shortstop’s Position Revolutionized by Jack Glasscock,” Wheeling News-Register, July 9, 1939, part V, 2, 5.
16. The typescript was never edited, as Smith’s newspaper articles were, and sometimes it is rather hard to read. The fact that it is a transcription also means that there are errors and typos that were (probably) not in the handwritten original.
17. Guy M. Smith, “Passing of Hines Finds Few Flayers of His Period Among the Survivors,” The Sporting News, July 25, 1935, 3.
18. Smith, “John T. Brush,” 9-10.
19. See the 1889 Indianapolis game log at Retrosheet (https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1889/VIN301889.htm).
20. “Double-Umpire System,” Indianapolis Journal, August 24, 1889, 5.
22. Smith, “John T. Brush,” 5-6.
23. Laing, Bud Fowler, 83-85; Sporting Life, April 22, 1885, 4; Sporting Life, June 3, 1885, 7; Sporting Life, June 24, 1885, 2.
24. Laing, Bud Fowler, 84; Indianapolis Journal, “Western League Affairs,” April 3, 1885, 8.
25. Indianapolis Sentinel, May 1, 1885, 4; Indianapolis Journal, May 8, 1885, 4; Indianapolis Sentinel, May 9, 1885, 4.
26. Indianapolis Journal, “The Ball Club Disbands,” June 16, 1885, 8.
27. Sporting Life, July 22, 1885, 4.
29. Sporting Life, “Crawfordsville Chips,” May 9, 1888, 9.
30. See Laing, Bud Fowler, 78-83; https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ Bud-Fowler; and https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/otto-schomberg.
31. Terre Haute Express, July 4, 1888, 1; Terre Haute Express, July 5, 1888, 1; Terre Haute Express, July 24, 1888, 1.
32. Indianapolis News, “Terre Haute Base Ball Club No More,” July 23, 1888, 1.
33. Terre Haute Express, July 26, 1888, 1; Terre Haute Express, July 27, 1888, 1.
34. Laing, Bud Fowler, 89-92. Note that Smith’s account says that Fowler starred for Binghamton after the Brush incident, rather than before, but this is obviously another example of Smith confusing details.
35. Stefan Fatsis, “Mystery of Baseball: Was William White Game’s First Black?” Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2004; Peter Morris and Stefan Fatsis, “Baseball’s Secret Pioneer,” Slate, February 4, 2014 (https://slate.com/culture/2014/02/william-edward-white-the-firstblack- player-in-major-league-baseball-history-lived-his-life-as-a-white-man).
36. The best account of these events is still Jerry Malloy, “Out At Home: Baseball Draws the Color Line, 1887,” The National Pastime (SABR), 2 (1983); 14-28, reprinted in The Armchair Book of Baseball II, ed. John Thorn (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 267.
37. Brian McKenna, “George Stovey,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/George-Stovey.
38. Sporting Life, September 8, 1886, 5.
39. “Stovey, the Pitcher and his Experience in Jersey City – Anson’s Prejudice,” Cleveland Gazette, February 13, 1892; reprinted in Jerry Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, With Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886-1935 (Bison Books, 1996), 141-2.
40. Sporting Life, April 8, 1887, 9; David W. Zang, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer (Bison Books, 1998), 55.
41. Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, lvii.
42. Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, 76. White’s book was published in 1907. Benjamin Tillman was a violently racist US Senator from South Carolina; James Kimble Vardaman was the racist governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908, and later a US Senator. Both were White supremacists who openly advocated lynching Blacks.
43. Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, 76-77.
44. “Syracuse Champions,” Sporting Life, October 3, 1888, 1.
45. Sporting Life, October 3, 1888, 1 (a separate item after the column cited above).
46. The Indianapolis World account is described by Malloy, “Out At Home” (p. 241 in the 1988 edition), and the New York Age account (from the October 13, 1888 edition) is cited by Zang, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart, 141n47.
47. Zang, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart, 61.