Pete Washington

Negro Leagues encyclopedist/historian James A. Riley summarized outfielder Pete Washington’s skill set as one of a “very fast outfielder with exceptional range afield … got a great jump on the ball and was one of the best defensive outfielders in the East during the ’20s and ’30s. However, his offensive punch was not equal to his glovework, and he usually batted in the lower half of the batting order throughout. …”1

The description of Washington, while technically accurate, is a bit misleading. The fielding excellence he displayed while roaming left and center fields for various teams in the 1920s and 1930s was undeniable, but at the peak of his career Washington performed in the top half of the American Negro League in OPS+. He hit 10 home runs in their shorter seasons twice and posted a lifetime .270/.341/.407 slash line over his career. 

In one of the best games of his career, in 1934 and just two years before his retirement from baseball, his grand slam off George Britt contributed to a season-opening Philadelphia Stars win over Dick Lundy’s Newark Dodgers. At only 5-feet-9 and 160 pounds, Washington did not look like a right-handed power hitter, but he fused his generally reliable – if not always spectacular – offense with his often-brilliant defense to craft a solid 13-year career in professional baseball. His career included stops in the Eastern Colored Leagues and the short-lived American-Negro and East-West Leagues, before finally culminating in a championship with Philadelphia in the second Negro National League.

Peter Smith Washington was born on June 25, 1903, to Joseph and Fannie Smith Washington in Albany, Georgia. Washington had an elder stepbrother, Jerry, and older sisters Ella and Eureka, as well as younger sisters Josie and Lucy and brothers Charlie and Joseph [called Hercules]. Albany is one of the larger communities in southwest Georgia. While predominantly agricultural, the city has spawned athletic talent over the years ranging from football Hall of Fame fullback Marion Motley to more modern stars like Ray Knight. Leesburg, barely 10 miles north, is the home of former San Francisco Giants catcher and 2012 National League Most Valuable Player, Gerald “Buster” Posey. 

Peter’s father, Joe Washington was a lineman for an emerging telephone company. While little is known about Pete’s scholastic career, he did work as a delivery person for a local tailor shop in 1920.2 In 1921 Washington’s mother, Fannie, died. The following year, Pete and Lillie Washington were married. Both were just 19 years old, but the next year they welcomed a daughter, Fannie, named after her grandmother. That year Pete signed to play baseball with the Washington Potomacs of the East Coast League.3 Washington’s manager, future Hall of Famer Ben Taylor, a gifted player in his own right and a cerebral baseball coach, evidently sanded some of the rough edges off the 20-year-old’s game. By midseason the young player was starting in the outfield.

In 1924 Washington started 47 games in left field, and notched 50 hits in 198 plate appearances.  The next season the team moved to Wilmington, Delaware, but it folded soon thereafter, forcing Washington to play out the rest of the year with the New York Lincoln Giants. There is no record of his playing in 1926, but in 1927 he joined the Baltimore Black Sox as full-time center fielder. Riley noted that, in August, he and several other players were involved in a serious automobile accident, but Washington emerged with only a few scrapes.4 Despite the brush with disaster, Washington was obviously not seriously hurt, as he hit .288 and slugged at a .498 clip for the season. That slugging average included 10 home runs, and his OPS+ finished at what became a career-high 124. 

The 1928 season marked another campaign in which Washington’s OPS+ exceeded the league average (107), and in 1929 he batted .315 with 10 more homers to help pace Baltimore to the American Negro League title in that circuit’s only year of existence. At the age of 27, Washington was playing at what proved to be the apex of his ability. 

That winter, according to the US Census, Pete, Lillie, and Fannie returned to Albany while he worked as a porter in a local department store. Lillie took in laundry for the extra income, which was helpful when she gave birth to their second daughter, Decoursey, later that year. At some point not identified, either at birth or in infancy, Decoursey contracted polio. The disease claimed her life 21 years later.

Washington’s overall performance on the field declined over that summer of 1930. His glove and his legs kept him in the starting lineup in center field, but his batting average dropped to .255 and his OPS+ to 81. After two more seasons with the Black Sox, he signed on with the then-independent Philadelphia Stars in 1933. In 1934 the Stars joined the new, second iteration of the Negro National League, and they won the inaugural title in a controversial seven-game series against the Chicago American Giants.

The 1934 season started well for Washington. In an April game, the Pittsburgh Courier reported, he started in center field and scored two runs in Philadelphia’s 9-3 win over a local club squad.5 In May he contributed to wins over the Newark Dodgers6 and the Pittsburgh Crawfords (a team with an aging Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, and Jimmie Crutchfield) as the starting right fielder.7 Against the Dodgers, Washington hit a fourth-inning grand slam completely out of Passon Field in Philadelphia. He also doubled in two runs, for a total of six RBIs in the game.8 In the opening game of a late June doubleheader against the Cleveland Red Sox, Washington drove in the game-winning run when he doubled home Jud Wilson in the bottom of the ninth inning.9

While Washington was clearly aging, his power at the plate still emerged on occasion. On July 9 he homered against Newark in a 15-4 Stars win, and in August he drove in a pair of runs against a squad called Kearney Lumber. On August 6, against Ed Gottlieb’s Philadelphia League All Stars, Washington stole home for the only Stars’ run of the exhibition.10 Early in August, final voting put him in second place to James “Cool Papa” Bell for the starting center-field slot in the second East-West All Star Game.11 

On August 26 Washington hammered his final homer of the year, a solo shot against the Nashville Elite Giants that proved to be the difference in the 4-3 Philadelphia win.12 At the end of September, on the 29th and in front of roughly 3,000 spectators at Passon Field, Washington contributed two hits and a run in the Stars’ 4-1 win over the American Giants. The latter team was talent-laden, with Turkey Stearnes leading off and followed in succession by the intimidating trio of Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, Mule Suttles, and Willie “El Diablo” Wells, but Philadelphia prevailed.13 That championship series marked the end of what was Washington’s only championship season in the Negro National League, and the second of his career. Washington closed out his 1934 campaign with an RBI double against the mighty Pittsburgh Crawfords on October 7 in Washington, D.C.14

The next year, 1935, Washington was relegated to a reserve role, and he logged only two extra-base hits in stints with both the Stars and the New York Black Yankees. In 1936 he appeared in only three games with the Brooklyn Royal Giants, and while he picked up six hits and two walks in only 14 plate appearances, he was not offered a contract for 1937. Pete Washington’s big-league career included 585 games and 2,330 plate appearances. He had 546 hits and 50 home runs in amassing a lifetime .270/.341/.407 slash line, and a lifetime OPS+ of 96. In all, it was not a bad offensive career for a player known mostly for his defense.

By 1940, Washington was living in Baltimore and working odd jobs to eke out a living. His entry in the 1940 census identified him as a widower, but a separate page in the census recorded Lillie, Fannie, and Decoursey as living in Tallahassee, Florida, roughly 90 miles south of Albany. Lillie, working as a private maid, was also listed as a widow. Clearly both were alive, yet each self-identified as widowed. There is no existing explanation, although it appears that the couple may have separated but not divorced.

In 1941 Washington returned to Philadelphia and worked as a stevedore for the Southern Steamship Company. In 1942 he left that job to enlist in the US Army. Entering the Army at Camp Butner, in North Carolina, on Halloween, 1942, Washington served with the 922nd Air Base Security Battalion before his discharge six months later.15 Six weeks after his release from the Army, Washington’s father died in Albany.

Washington remained in Philadelphia after his wartime service. In 1946 daughter Fannie married James Alexander of New Jersey and they later gave Pete two grandchildren. In 1948 Decoursey had a daughter, a third grandchild, with Israel Green, also from Albany, Georgia. It is possible that Lillie had passed away, and Fannie went to live near her father while Decoursey stayed with the extended family in the South.

In 1950 Washington applied for a wartime pension and was awarded $60 per month. That, combined with the money he made working in a Philadelphia restaurant, appears to have been his only forms of subsistence for the remainder of his life. On September 4, 1962, at the age of 59, Pete Washington was pronounced dead on arrival at Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia. The cause of death was identified as hypertensive arteriosclerotic heart disease.16 On September 11 he was buried in Beverly, New Jersey. 

Pete Washington was an excellent baseball player, started on championship teams in both Baltimore and Philadelphia, and enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for defensive excellence on the diamond over his 13-year professional career. While such comparisons are at best estimates only, the website baseball-reference.com lists Jackie Jensen, who had an excellent run of seasons with the Boston Red Sox from 1954 to 1959, as a comparable player to Washington. 

Washington was a husband, a father, and a grandfather as well as a ballplayer, but his life still ended in the relative anonymity shared by so many of his Black contemporaries. His life is, for that reason alone, one that is worth remembering.

Sources

The statistical data was pulled from seamheads.com, and the secondary comparative information from baseball-reference.com.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Gary Ashwill.

Notes

1 James A. Riley, “Pete Washington,” The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002), 280.

2 United States Census, 1920. Georgia/Dougherty County/Albany/District 0061.

3 “Silks Win Decisive Victory Over Potomacs, Scoring All Their Runs in Two Innings,” Shamokin (Pennsylvania) News-Dispatch, August 20, 1923: 3.

4 Riley, 280.

5 “Bolden’s Stars Flare, Blot Out Raphael Team,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 21, 1934: 14.

6 Rollo Wilson, “Jones Holds Lundymen to Three Hits; Phila. Stars Win Opener in Big Way,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 19, 1934: 14.

7 “Stars Beat Crawfords,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 19, 1934: 14.

8 “Stars Topple Newark for Inaugural 12-0 Win,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 17, 1934. 

9 “Phila. Stars Beat Cleveland Four Straight,” Philadelphia Tribune, June 28, 1934: 12.

10 “Philly Stars Slap Yankees Twice,” Philadelphia Tribune, August 9, 1934: 12.

11 “Final Standing: The East,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 25, 1934: 15.

12 “Stars Clip Nashville Gts.,” Philadelphia Tribune, August 30, 1934: 12.

13 “Philadelphia Stars 4, Chicago American Giants 1” Online: https://www.retrosheet.org/NegroLeagues/boxesetc/NgLg/B09290PH51934.htm.

14 “Craws, Grays Win Against Stars, Yanks,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 13, 1934: 21.

15 “Peter S. Washington Application for World War II Compensation,” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania form No. 1, April 26, 1950.

16 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Health, Medical Examiner’s Certificate of Death; file 089562-62, registered number 17424, issued September 11, 1962.