The History of the Homestead Grays

The ascent of the Homestead Grays to the peak they reached in 1931 was 30 years in the making and sprang directly from the vision of one man.

It didn’t begin that way, though. Like many teams, both Black and White, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Grays formed for recreation and played under a different name. A group of young Black men, mostly workers from nearby steel mills, formed the team in 1900 to have some fun outside of work.1 Calling themselves the Germantown Blue Ribbons,2 they took on other amateur teams in and around the Homestead section of Pittsburgh. They were competitive, even good at times, but for a decade they remained nothing more than another amateur team in an area flooded with baseball clubs made up of industrial workers.

The original managers of the club walked away in 1910, but most of the players wanted to continue. They met at the home of John Freyl Alexander to reorganize the club, which they rebranded as the Murdock Grays.3 Alexander was elected the club’s new president, charged with all off-field matters like scheduling, while Jerry Veney was chosen as the team’s on-field player-manager. They played under their new name for just two seasons before deciding that their hometown needed to be represented more clearly. In 1912 the Homestead Grays were born, and they had on their roster a skinny young man better known for playing basketball. Little did they know at the time that he would transform their modest recreational team into one of the preeminent professional teams in Black baseball history.

Cumberland Posey had graduated from Homestead High School in 1908 and gone to Penn State University to play basketball, but by 1910 he was back in Pittsburgh and joined the Grays in 1911 as an outfielder while continuing to play basketball, both at the University of Pittsburgh and Holy Ghost College, now known as Duquesne University.4 Posey came from a wealthy family, his father having owned several businesses and served as president of the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s Black newspaper. A good athlete who learned from his father how to run a business and leverage publicity, the younger Posey brought a unique mix of skills to the Grays. The club almost immediately put those skills to use.

Seeking to convert the club into a semipro and ultimately fully-professional enterprise, they followed Posey’s suggestion to operate it as a cooperative.5 The players and investors shared the team’s expenses and profits, which attracted more skilled players to join. Posey’s experience organizing basketball teams and booking their opponents translated directly into the Grays’ plans as well. Advertisements for opponents began appearing in his father’s newspaper,6 and the team was able to keep a full slate of games most years. By 1916 Posey had won a power struggle over control of the team. A new president of the club, Charles Walker, agreed to proceed with Sunday scheduling, and Posey became captain and then field manager. By 1920 he had full operational control of the franchise.7

With that control, Posey decided to make the club a fully professional operation. Though they’d been successful as a semipro club for a decade, they were threatened by the arrival of the Pittsburgh Keystones in 1921, a professional team that featured Dizzy Dismukes and had the ability to pay players considerably better than the Grays had been. With Walker backing him financially, Posey set out to increase the players’ individual salaries and the team’s overall payroll. The higher pay attracted the attention of a better class of ballplayer. Posey was able to sign established pros like Oscar Owens, Jasper Washington, and Lefty Williams, as well as highly sought-after youngsters like Walter “Rev” Cannady and a young outfielder whose legacy would be forever tied to the Grays as their most successful manager, Vic Harris. Even the great Smokey Joe Williams, widely viewed as the best pitcher in Black baseball at the time, agreed to join the Grays in 1925.8

These players wouldn’t have signed with Posey if not for the bump in payroll, but the enhanced salaries required an increase in revenue to pay them. That prompted Posey to reach an agreement with the Pirates to use the home ballpark, Forbes Field, which had a capacity of 25,000 at the time and would soon increase to 41,000,9 far more than the small local fields they had been using.

It also meant dedicating more time to barnstorming.

Pittsburgh’s geography placed the Grays in a fortunate position. The powers of Black baseball in the Eastern part of the country were centered in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, but Pittsburgh was a reasonable bus or train ride to all of them. Black baseball in the Midwest was centered in Chicago mostly, but also in Kansas City, Detroit, and St. Louis, and those could be reached reasonably from Pittsburgh as well. In essence, the Grays were the westernmost team among the Eastern powers while also being the easternmost team of the Western powers, and that fortunate situation was one that Posey leveraged as much as possible.

He built a rigorous barnstorming schedule for the Grays, taking them to all those places and others between them. With their improved roster they were always good and therefore drew crowds who wanted to see some of the more famous names in Black baseball. The team became such a reliable draw that it was one of the few able to demand a rain guarantee to appear, assuring that it would be paid even if the game was rained out.10

Rube Foster, in his capacity as the president of the Negro National League, made overtures to the Grays to join the League, as did the operators of the Eastern Colored League once it began play in 1923. Having the Homestead Grays as part of either league would have lent legitimacy to their operations, not only raising the level of play but assuring bigger crowds as well. The Grays were a draw, and the rival leagues wanted them to join.

For years Posey rejected all these offers. He found the Grays’ position to be far too lucrative to sacrifice for a league. Even when leagues refused to allow their members to schedule games against the Grays as an attempt to force Posey to join, he simply replaced them by scheduling games against top White semipro clubs on both sides of the Allegheny Mountains.11 He knew that the Grays would always be in demand, and that league finances were unstable enough that clubs would defy their leagues and eventually schedule the Grays anyway, which they did.

Being outside of a league structure also allowed Posey to ignore their rules about raiding rival rosters for talented players. The Grays were free to go after the best players without fear of league reprisal, particularly since the best players typically weren’t punished for jumping their contracts because their services were in demand. This allowed Posey to poach Smokey Joe Williams from the Brooklyn Royal Giants before the 1925 season, and George “Tubby” Scales from the New York Lincoln Giants that same year.

As with most teams from the earliest days of Black baseball, it’s hard to find complete information about the Grays’ performance on the field during these years. Even so, reports in Black newspapers make it clear the team was successful. They were described in 1924 as having a roster “built to compare favorably with that of any of the major league clubs.”12 As the season progressed, their success was documented in grandiose terms. “The Grays this season have stepped out, playing winning ball consistently,” said an article in the Pittsburgh Courier. “No club has yet been able to halt their victorious march toward the local semi-pro championship, and the fans, always eager to see the clan of Posey in action, are more enthusiastic than ever of the rejuvenated line up, which shapes up as the strongest in local history.”13

The Grays continued to be able to compete against the best teams in the organized Negro Leagues. They were good enough to entice Rube Foster to bring his club to Pittsburgh to face them. The Chicago American Giants were one of the crown jewels of the Negro National League, having won the league’s first two pennants and featuring such stars as future Hall of Fame members Willie Foster and Cristóbal Torriente. They would compete for the pennant again in 1924, and yet the Grays were viewed as being on an equal footing to them. Their series in Pittsburgh was billed as being a match between “two diversified systems and styles of play,” noting that Posey’s team was “a strong hitting club,” with “an A-1 pitching staff,” that “expects to give the Westerners a real battle.”14

Their ongoing success also allowed them to recruit players from across Black baseball. Slugger John Beckwith joined the Grays in 1926 and became their primary third baseman. The legendary Oscar Charleston also suited up for Homestead for the first time that season. A year later it was Martin Dihigo who came over from the Cuban Stars East, then pitchers Nip Winters and Webster McDonald were poached by Posey in 1928.

This constant flow of talent, and the Grays’ continued success, eventually made Posey confident that the team would do well in league play. He was eager to prove they could thrive in that format and decided in 1929 that it was finally time for the Grays to join a formal league.15 The Eastern Colored League ceased operating after the 1928 season, leading five of its members to form a new league. The American Negro League would be built around those five teams – the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants, the Baltimore Black Sox, the Cuban Stars, the Hilldale Daisies, and the New York Lincoln Giants – but they would be joined by the Homestead Grays for the first time.

The season didn’t go as well as Posey had planned. The team certainly wasn’t bad, posting a record of 32-29-3 in league games, but that was good for just third in the league. Baltimore’s club, with standouts like Dick Lundy, Rap Dixon, and future Hall of Famer Jud Wilson, was the class of the league, winning both halves of its split schedule and being declared the winner without a postseason series being played. The Grays finished 11½ games out, with neither the team nor most of its players leading the league in any major statistical category. The lone exception was pitcher Joe Williams, who continued to be a marvel at the age of 43, leading the league in strikeout rate, walk rate, and WHIP. The team didn’t get an opportunity to redeem itself the next year because the league folded after that season. The Grays went back to being an independent club for the next two years.

And, for those two years, they might have been the best all-around team in baseball history.

In 1930 the Grays had three future Hall of Famers in their lineup. Charleston was still on the team, playing first base most days. At third base was Judy Johnson, who starred for Hilldale for more than a decade before being enticed to join the Grays briefly in 1929 and full-time a year later. And the arrival of a phenom to play catcher would alter the course of not only the Grays but of the Negro Leagues in general. That’s how good Josh Gibson was.

Gibson was only 18 years old in 1930, and the likely apocryphal story of his discovery has been told many times. In July, during a night game played against the Kansas City Monarchs, who had brought their portable lighting system to town, the Grays’ regular catcher Buck Ewing injured his hand in the poor lighting. Depending on whom you believe, either Cum Posey16 or Judy Johnson17 then beckoned to the stands, where Gibson was a spectator, and asked if he wanted to catch the remainder of the game. He said yes, and the rest is history. So goes the story anyway.

No matter what the truth of his first appearance might be, what is undeniable is that Gibson was immediately spectacular. His .374 batting average was bested only by Scales’ .398 mark on the team, and no one could touch his .692 slugging percentage. He hit towering home runs, including one that was reported to be the only fair ball ever hit over the roof in Yankee Stadium.18 He remained a staple in the Grays’ lineup (except for a five-year interlude with the crosstown Pittsburgh Crawfords) for most of the next 16 years.

 

 

With those three legends anchoring the lineup, ably supported by veterans like Scales at second base, Vic Harris in left field, and Chaney White in center, and with a pitching staff still led by Joe Williams, Lefty Williams, and George Britt, that team posted a recorded record of 44-15-1. Of course, they played far more games than just those that were officially recorded. They continued to barnstorm around the country as they had in the past because it was their best source of income. That often included games against White competition from the major leagues.

Their season culminated with a matchup against the New York Lincoln Giants in what was referred to as the Eastern World Series. New York was a deep team featuring stars like Turkey Stearnes, Charlie Smith, Clint Thomas, Fats Jenkins, and John Beckwith, and was managed by the legendary John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. They were a worthy opponent, but Posey’s Grays won six of the 10 games in the series to claim the unofficial title.19

And then they got better.

The 1931 edition of the Homestead Grays might be the greatest collection of talent on one team in baseball history. They not only retained all-time greats like Charleston, Gibson, and Joe Williams, but brought in future Hall of Famers Jud Wilson to play third base and Willie Foster to augment the pitching staff. They even briefly added Satchel Paige late in the season and still had a solid supporting cast that included Tubby Scales, Vic Harris, Lefty Williams, Ted Page, and Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. This awesome collection of talent combined to post an overall record of 143-29-2 once all of their games against town teams, semipro squads, barnstorming squads, and organized Black professional teams are included.20 Though there was no Eastern World Series organized that season, Posey used his column in the Pittsburgh Courier to happily declare that the Grays were the “undisputed National Championship team” of Black baseball, thanks to their season series victories over ever team they played.21

After the club had existed for over 30 years, with Posey being the key figure for most of that history, his vision for Black baseball had finally won out. He had remained steadfast in the notion that his method would be more successful than his competition, and events had proven him right. On the field, his relentless pursuit of talent, even at the expense of anger from his peers with other Black ballclubs, had produced arguably the greatest team in history. Off the field, his business model of mostly remaining independent and retaining control of the Grays’ schedule had allowed the club to prosper. They were in constant demand, and generally free to fill that demand without the need of clearing their schedule of league commitments first.

Meanwhile, the leagues that had pursued him, and that he had repeatedly rebuffed, had all fallen away by the end of that glorious 1931 season. The Negro National League folded after the 1931 season, having slowly collapsed after the illness and death of its founder, Rube Foster. The Eastern Colored League and American Negro League had died out as well. This left a void in Black baseball, and now that he found himself as the most successful remaining Black baseball executive, Posey decided to fill that void himself.

He used the same column in which he’d declared the Grays the champion of Black baseball to also declare his intentions of beginning a new league of Black ballclubs.22 The result was something called the East-West League, and it quickly proved that Posey had overplayed his hand, and its failure launched the most difficult period in the Grays’ franchise history.

Founded during the tough economic times of the Depression, the league faced an uphill battle from the beginning. That was not made better by Posey’s decision to exclude some of Black baseball’s best teams. Longstanding, stable clubs like the Chicago American Giants and Kansas City Monarchs weren’t invited to join, even though Posey wanted to have its membership include both Eastern and Midwestern teams.23 Other successful teams, like the New York Lincoln Giants and St. Louis Stars, had disbanded because of financial problems, robbing the new league of even more well-known clubs.

Most critically, Posey purposely excluded the Pittsburgh Crawfords, a burgeoning team in the same city as the Grays that was gathering up talented players in much the same fashion Posey had. The Crawfords’ owner, Gus Greenlee, wanted to be part of the upper levels of Black baseball, and sought an invitation to join Posey’s new league, but Posey didn’t want Greenlee to succeed and introduce a strong rival to the same city, so his only offers to Greenlee were on terms purposely designed to be rejected.24 They were, and the exclusion of the Crawfords further weakened the new league.

The season went as poorly as expected under the circumstances. Only weeks into the season, teams started to abandon the league’s mandated schedule because of low attendance and gate receipts. In early July they ceased to operate altogether, something Posey blamed on the economy and the actions of White booking agents who controlled venues and demanded exorbitant fees.25

The league’s failure damaged the Grays’ finances, and Posey’s exclusion of the Crawfords motivated Greenlee to aggressively raid the Grays’ roster in the same manner Posey had demonstrated through the years. Before the 1932 season was over, Rev Cannady, Josh Gibson, Jud Wilson, and Cool Papa Bell had jumped the Grays in favor of the Crawfords. In the cases of Oscar Charleston and Ted Page, they jumped before the season even began. When 1933 dawned, it was Greenlee’s club that now had the best roster in Black baseball, and Posey and the Grays found themselves greatly damaged and hoping for an invitation to join Greenlee’s new Negro National League to help them stay afloat.

That invitation came, and Posey agreed to it, but it was only on an interim basis. The Grays were considered only associate members of the new league and didn’t play a full schedule.26 Posey wanted to maintain the ability to barnstorm as needed and rebuild the club by raiding rosters for talent, something league rules would have prevented him from doing. With his best players gone and financial struggles being the prime reason they left, Posey decided to bring in a partner. Rufus “Sonnyman” Jackson made his money as a numbers runner in Pittsburgh, which was not an uncommon source of wealth among owners in the Negro Leagues.27 He didn’t know much about baseball, so Posey retained control of the baseball side of their operations, but he now had someone to rely upon to pay the bills.

During this rebuilding period, the Grays couldn’t approach the level of on-field dominance they’d enjoyed before their roster was decimated. They played under-.500 ball in NNL games and had far fewer household names to rely upon to draw fans as they barnstormed. Ted Radcliffe started the year on the team but eventually left for greener pastures, and Vic Harris remained in the outfield, but few other stars emerged. One who did was pitcher Ray Brown. He’d been lured away from the Indianapolis ABCs when the East-West League formed, and split time between Posey’s two teams, the Grays and Detroit Wolves.28 Once the Wolves and the league folded, the Grays became Brown’s permanent club for the rest of his career, one that would end with his election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

The team’s financial cloud lifted briefly in 1934, as the Depression’s impact on the economy eased somewhat and attendance increased across Black baseball. Posey assessed the season as “one of the best, as a whole, ever experienced by colored baseball.”29 He had reason to be happy that went beyond finances. A year after Posey acquired Brown, who would anchor his pitching staff for more than a decade, he signed Buck Leonard in 1934 to play first base, something he would do for the Grays for the rest of Posey’s life. Leonard batted .333 that season, a mark that would prove to be his worst until 1942, and would finish his career with a .345 average that would eventually help land him a place in the Hall of Fame alongside Brown.

With the NNL now at least relatively flush, the Grays returned to league play in 1935, as full members this time. They remained a far cry from the dominant teams of the past, even with Brown and Leonard as their anchors, in large part because Greenlee’s Crawfords remained the power of the league. They cruised to pennants in both 1935 and 1936, while Homestead lagged well behind, combining for a record that was under .500 in league play those years.

But Greenlee’s dominance couldn’t last. The economy took another downward turn, cutting deeply into his finances. In addition, several star players jumped their contracts in 1937, lured by the money offered by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. The Crawfords, with the best talent in the league, were particularly targeted. Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Sam Bankhead, and other members of the team left Greenlee with more holes than he could fill. So did his trade of Josh Gibson back to the Grays, a move he was forced to make when he could no longer afford to pay him. Even though Gibson, too, eventually left to play in the Dominican Republic, and spent time playing in both Cuba and Mexico30 from time to time over the next several years, his presence in the lineup next to Leonard gave the Grays a one-two punch that couldn’t be matched.

That 1937 season began a remarkable run for the Grays. Once famously independent in their operations, they now became the dominant force in league play, winning the Negro National League pennant nine straight years. This dominance not only coincided with the downfall of Greenlee’s Crawfords and the return of Gibson to Homestead’s lineup, but also with the installation of Vic Harris as the team’s field manager.

A solid player who had first appeared for the Grays when he was only 20 years old, Harris had been their regular left fielder for most of the prior decade, routinely batting over .300, aggressively running the bases, and playing solid defense. He was selected to play in each of the first two East-West All-Star games (1933 and 1934) ever held, and would ultimately be chosen for seven.31 In 1936 he added field manager to his responsibilities, and the team improved immediately. Having posted their first, and ultimately only, sub-.500 season in league play the year before, Harris guided the club in 1936 to a winning record and a third-place finish in his first year running the team. In 1937 he led them to their first league pennant. He would eventually win seven as their manager.

With Harris at the helm, the twin towers of Leonard and Gibson in the heart of the batting order, and Brown leading the pitching staff, the Grays proved nearly unbeatable for most of their remaining season in the Negro National League. The 1937 club had an official league record of 41-17 and finished five games ahead of the Newark Eagles for the pennant. A year later they were 39-13, 6½ games better than the Philadelphia Stars. The 1939 season produced another pennant, though the Grays lost the league’s championship series to the Baltimore Elite Giants. In 1940 they got their revenge by beating Baltimore by 3½ games for another pennant, though they lost longtime financial supporter Charley Walker, who died near the end of the season.

That pennant was won without the services of Josh Gibson, who spent most of the 1940 and 1941 seasons playing for Veracruz in the Mexican League. It didn’t matter to the Grays’ success, though, as other players stepped up. Jerry Benjamin was a stalwart in center field, regularly batting over .300 and leading the league in steals three times. Howard Easterling arrived and took over third base, twice leading the league in triples and once in RBIs while batting .305 in a Grays uniform. Even the venerable Jud Wilson, 46 years old in 1940, came back to the Grays to finish his remarkable career. He could still hit despite his advanced years, producing a .293 average from 1940 to 1945, when he was 51 years old.

Cum Posey continued to act as a bit of a mercenary in finding talented players and enticing them to bolster the Grays roster. Right fielder David Whatley batted .396 in 1938, but he was playing for the Grays before the following year was over and remained for several years. Chester Williams was enticed back from Mexico to play shortstop for a couple of years, as was the oft-traveled pitcher Terris McDuffie, who helped secure the 1941 pennant by leading the league in wins.

Josh Gibson also returned from Mexico in time for the 1942 season and picked up mostly where he’d left off. His .340 average was a bit off by his standards, but he remained so feared that he led the league in walks and on-base percentage as Homestead cruised to another pennant. That season was the first in 15 years that featured a World Series of Black baseball. The rival Negro American League had begun operating in 1937, with play dominated by many of the same clubs that been part of the Rube Foster’s original Negro National League. The Kansas City Monarchs were among them, winning five of the league’s first six pennants. Their star was the famed Satchel Paige, so when the two leagues agreed to revive the Negro Leagues World Series, it set up a confrontation not only between the two most successful franchises, but between the two most famous players, too.

The result was anticlimactic, as Kansas City swept the Grays in four games.32 Paige started and won two games, and saved another, as Kansas City needed only three pitchers to hold Homestead to just 12 runs in the series. Gibson struggled mightily (perhaps in part due to poor health), with just one hit and two walks in 15 trips to the plate, and was thoroughly outplayed by his opposite number, catcher Joe Greene of the Monarchs, who batted .500.

The disappointing end to the 1942 season didn’t impact the Grays much in 1943. In fact, they set the franchise’s all-time high in winning percentage in their years of league play by posting a record of 26-7. That .788 winning percentage was the highest of any team in the Negro National League’s history. Leading the way was Gibson, who was now fully returned to the form he’d displayed before playing in Mexico. He led the league in home runs, RBIs, and batting average. The Grays won another pennant and won the Negro League World Series for the first time, beating the Birmingham Black Barons.

Despite the club’s ongoing success, Posey continued to fight for every dollar of revenue as the Depression finally ended and World War II began. After years of reduced attendance in Pittsburgh, Posey noted the rapidly growing Black population in Washington and began having the Grays play some of their home games there. He contracted with Calvin Griffith, owner of the Washington Nationals, and the Grays began calling Griffith Stadium their second home.33 By the time of their dominant 1943 season, the Grays played most of their home games in Washington.34 One of the people who became a fan during their time in Washington was future baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. A scoreboard operator at Griffith Stadium, he witnessed Gibson, and Leonard, and the other greats of Black baseball up close, and that influenced his decision years later to push the leadership of the Baseball Hall of Fame to induct Negro Leagues players.35

Ultimately, though, the great play on the field, the move to Washington, and the boost in attendance the Negro National League received during World War II didn’t matter. Integration of the major leagues, long fought for and long overdue, finally arrived with the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson in late 1945 and he made his debut in 1947. That signing, though welcomed in the Black community, also spelled the death of the Negro Leagues and the Grays, because it was done without any compensation being sent from the Dodgers to Robinson’s club in the Negro American League, the Kansas City Monarchs.

It’s ironic that the very thing that allowed Posey to build the Grays into a juggernaut, the malleability of Negro Leagues contracts and the willingness of owners to ignore those contracts and raid their competitors for talent, proved to be the seeds of the Negro Leagues’ destruction. Though he had benefited from that practice as much as anyone, Posey knew it would pose an enormous problem for Black baseball teams if integration eventually happened. He was among several prominent figures, including sportswriters Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith, who advocated for more professionalized operations on the part of Negro Leagues owners, including more standardized contracts that were universally recognized.36 But those calls for change were ignored, and Branch Rickey finally decided to take advantage.

That environment of so-called lawlessness in the Negro Leagues gave Rickey and other White owners the idea that they could do what the Black counterparts had always done when it served their purposes.37 They simply ignored those contracts and started signing the best Black players. With a few notable exceptions, like Bill Veeck, they rarely offered any compensation in return. Some spoke up in protest, like Effa Manley of the Newark Eagles.38 Posey was another, though he mostly reserved his anger for the players who were leaving rather than for the White owners who signed them.39

Even if he’d used his great energy to lobby for fair compensation to Negro Leagues teams, Posey soon wasn’t around to do so. Only six months after Jackie Robinson signed to play for the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal, Cumberland Posey died of cancer at the age of 53.40 Less than a year later, Josh Gibson died as well. He was only 35, felled by a stroke that was thought to have been brought on by a brain tumor.41 With the loss of their best player and the visionary who had guided the team’s operations for three decades, the Grays faltered a bit during the 1946 and 1947 seasons. Their streak of NNL pennants came to an end, and in 1947 they had a losing record, finishing 33-34 in league play.

Sonnyman Jackson took over the daily operations of the team, and though he didn’t know much about running a baseball team, he eventually cobbled together a very good squad. By 1948 the team had an entirely new outfield, Luke Easter, Luis Márquez, and Bob Thurman, and elder statesmen Buck Leonard and Sam Bankhead remained productive hitters. The club’s pitching was thin, but it scored the second-most runs in the league and bashed its way to the league’s best overall record in 1948, followed by a win in the championship series over Baltimore, and victory in the final Negro Leagues World Series ever played, a 4-to-1 drubbing of the Birmingham Black Barons.

It all came to an end quickly after that. The Negro National League disbanded after the 1948 season, their finances ravaged by the loss of their best players to the newly integrated major leagues. The club also lost Jackson to a brain tumor in March 1949, and leadership of the team fell to Posey’s brother, Seward “See” Posey. They tried to join the Negro American League as associate members but were turned down and joined the independent Negro American Association instead.42 The Grays outclassed the other clubs in that minor league, winning the final pennant in franchise history, and the final one in the league’s history, too, as it ceased operations after that season.

After a year of barnstorming in 1950, the Homestead Grays shut down for good in May 1951.43 They left behind a legacy of greatness, including the most pennants in the history of the Negro National League, and the most former members who are now in the Baseball Hall of Fame.44 The vision of Cumberland Posey, the finances of Sonnyman Jackson, and the skill of Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Ray Brown, and others, combined to make the Homestead Grays arguably the greatest franchise in Negro Leagues history.

PAUL WHITE, a SABR member since 2001, is a native of Boston and lifelong fan of the Red Sox. He began publishing a blog called Lost in Left Field in 2002, and it’s still published today at www.lostinleftfield.com or www.pauldwhite.substack.com. Paul has contributed several entries to the SABR Games Project and the SABR BioProject, and contributed an essay to 2024 SABR’s book about Sandy Koufax. Paul’s book, Cooperstown’s Back Door: A History of Negro Leaguers in the Baseball Hall of Fame, was published by McFarland Publishing in 2024. He and his wife live near Kansas City.

 

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted MLB.com, Baseball-Reference.com, Seamheads.com, and Fangraphs.com for any pertinent information, including career statistics. Note that these sources sometimes do not agree on statistics and data related to Negro Leagues teams and players. When there was a discrepancy, the MLB.com figures were the ones cited.

 

NOTES

1 Rob Ruck, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 128.

2 Brady Smith, “Negro League Centennial: Negro League Baseball in Pittsburgh,” www.heinzhistorycenter.org, August 13, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/western-pennsylvania-history-negro-league-baseball-in-pittsburgh/.

3 Mark Ribowsky, A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1884 to 1955 (Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group, 1997), 147.

4 Brian McKenna, “Cum Posey,” SABR BioProject. Retrieved from https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/cum-posey/.

5 Ruck, 129.

6 “Local News,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1912: 4.

7 Lawrence D. Hogan, Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball (Washington: National Geographic Society, 2006): 208-212.

8 Ruck, Sandlot Seasons, 131.

9 Curt Smith, “Forbes Field (Pittsburgh),” SABR BioProject. Retrieved from https://sabr.org/bioproj/park/forbes-field-pittsburgh/.

10 Ruck, 133.

11 Brad Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2003), 37.

12 “Baseball Stars Keep On Jumping Eastward,” Kansas City Call, February 1, 1924: 7.

13 “Homestead Grays to Play at Central Park, Friday and Saturday,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 10, 1924: 6.

14 “American Giants Big Sports Feature of Elk Week,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 23, 1924: 13.

15 Ruck, Sandlot Seasons, 135.

16 Bill Johnson, “Josh Gibson,” SABR BioProject. Retrieved from https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Josh-Gibson/.

17 John Holway, “Josh Gibson Greatest Slugger of Them All,” Baseball Digest, March 1971: 63.

18 Holway.

19 W. Rollo Wilson, “Grays Win Eastern World Series,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 4, 1930: A5.

20 “Homestead Grays,” MLB.com. Retrieved from https://www.mlb.com/history/negro-leagues/teams/homestead-grays.

21 Cum Posey, “Grays Undisputed Champs; Team Play Won-League Looms,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 10, 1931: A5.

22 Posey.

23 Hogan, Shades of Glory, 239.

24 Ruck, Sandlot Seasons, 155.

25 Ruck, 119.

26 Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators, 42.

27 Hogan, 304.

28 Chris Rainey, “Raymond Brown,” SABR BioProject. Retrieved from https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Raymond-Brown/.

29 Neil Lanctot, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 38.

30 Johnson, “Josh Gibson,” SABR BioProject.

31 Charlie Fouche, “Vic Harris,” SABR BioProject. Retrieved from https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Vic-Harris-2/.

32 See Richard J. Puerzer, “September 8-29, 1942: Satchel Paige’s Monarchs Sweep Josh Gibson’s Grays in Negro League World Series,” SABR Games Project. https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/september-8-29-1942-satchel-paiges-monarchs-sweep-josh-gibsons-grays-in-negro-league-world-series/

33 Ruck, Sandlot Seasons, 172-173.

34 Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators, 162.

35 Paul D. White, Cooperstown’s Back Door: A History of Negro Leaguers in the Baseball Hall of Fame (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Publishers, Inc., 2024), 89.

36 Snyder, 237.

37 Luke Epplin, Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball (New York: Flatiron Books, 2021), 99.

38 Epplin, 102.

39 Snyder, 238-239.

40 Hogan, Shades of Glory, 320.

41 Andrew Simon, “Josh Gibson,” MLB.com. Retrieved from https://www.mlb.com/history/negro-leagues/players/josh-gibson.

42 Ralph Carhart, “Rufus Jackson,” SABR BioProject. Retrieved from https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/rufus-jackson/.

43 “Grays Out of Baseball,” Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator, May 23, 1951: 29.

44 Tony Gleason, “‘The Genesis of Greatness’: MLB Recognizes the Negro Leagues as Major Leagues,” www.pepperdine-graphic.com , October 27, 2024. Retrieved from https://pepperdine-graphic.com/the-genesis-of-greatness-mlb-recognizes-the-negro-leagues-as-major-leagues/.