Jimmy Porter: A Man or a Legend?

Jimmy Porter will be remembered for his tall tales and by a youth baseball field that bears his name. (Courtesy of the City of Carrollton)

 

In the 1950s Dallas and Fort Worth stood apart, and scattered small towns surrounded the big cities. Since then, the cities have spread, the towns have filled in, and the outskirts have been transformed into suburbs. Today you can exit Interstate 635 in Dallas— the loop which was the boundary of the old city—and drive about five miles up Josey Lane without ever leaving built-up areas. If you do, you’ll come to a small park in the city of Carrollton, an area which used to be wide open fields. That park on Josey is named Jimmy Porter Park, for a longtime resident who made his name in baseball.

Jimmy Porter died in 1984, and the oft-repeated tale of his life focused on how he gave up his career in the Negro Leagues, where he faced the likes of Satchel Paige and Ty Cobb, to return home to Carrollton.1 The abiding story is of the hundreds of kids Jimmy played pickup ball with, encouraging legions of young people in the game.2

But did Jimmy Porter ever actually play in the Negro Leagues?

Stories prior to and contemporary with his death, often encouraged by his own comments, specifically mention Jimmy Porter having played on the 1926-27 St. Louis Stars in the Negro American League. But there’s a problem: The Stars were in the Negro National League, and current research doesn’t show his name on any Negro League roster, Stars or otherwise.3

There are numerous major league players we have little information on. The further back you go, the less there is. In the White major leagues, we aren’t even sure of the real names of some players from the nineteenth century. For many who played in the Negro Leagues, basic documentation such as a birth certificate may never have existed. Thus, for someone like Jimmy Porter, we have to rely on the stories told about him. As time goes by those stories naturally get stretched, and someone’s slightly made-up detail becomes a fact, passed down until the truth is lost.

We know that Jimmy Porter was born on September 2, 1900, in Jacksonville, Texas, a little over a hundred miles southeast of Dallas.4 The widely reported story is that his family moved from East Texas to Carrollton when Jimmy was young, and he lived there the rest of his life, with a brief break while he was in St. Louis with the Stars. Even this part of his story is disputed: some stories suggest he came to Carrollton when he was 18, and others say he didn’t move there until after his baseball career ended.5

Most of the stories about Jimmy agree that he took up baseball when he was six, encouraged by his father, and he eventually became good enough to go to St. Louis to play in the 1926 and 1927 seasons, where he played catcher, infield, and center field, after which he returned to Carrollton because he was homesick.

It is reasonable to think the best young player in the area would go to St. Louis to try out for the Stars, even if he was already in his mid-20s. There were a few options for a player in Texas, but the mighty Kansas City Monarchs may have seemed out of reach. Still, the romantic idea of a young man going off to seek his fortune is so common it is something of a trope in early twentieth century stories.

One odd thing is how he described the team he played for. In multiple stories Porter called them the St. Louis Cardinals, which of course was the name of the White major league team.6 When asked, he could not remember the name of his manager (to be fair, the Stars had four managers over those two seasons), and he even called it the Negro American League, a league which didn’t exist until 1937. Are these simply technical details, the signs of a fading memory, or the words of someone telling a tale which wasn’t quite true?

Another question is whether a player would really quit after two seasons because they were homesick. It’s certainly possible, although in those days there weren’t necessarily many opportunities for a young Black man to make as much money as he might have made in baseball.7 In one story, he says he had a lifetime .338 batting average, which doesn’t seem like a player you would let go for being homesick.8 It seems far more likely that Jimmy tried and tried to get on the team, perhaps even playing on a local semi-pro team, and eventually gave up, or ran out of money to stay in St. Louis.

There are also conflicting reports about what Jimmy did after leaving St. Louis. Some say he returned directly to Carrollton because he was homesick. Others say he went to Corsicana, Texas (50 miles south of Dallas), where he played and coached for a Black minor league team for four years. Still others say he moved to the family farm near Dallas and worked to help the family avoid failure. Any of these could be true, although if he was truly homesick, would he have gone to Corsicana for four years? If he was staying in baseball anyway, why not stay at the highest level?

When Satchel Paige died in 1982, Jimmy was interviewed for his thoughts on Paige.9 He told several tales about playing against Paige, none with great detail other than that Porter hit well against him. In the story we learn he also played against Babe Ruth (who apparently pitched to Porter), Willie Mays (born in 1931, so even if a teenage Mays played an exhibition in Texas, Porter would have been close to 50), and other stories mention him playing against both Ty Cobb and Joe DiMaggio. If any of these were true for the White players, at best they were in exhibition games due to the color barrier in baseball at the time. In fact research has shown that Cobb did not play against any Black players after 1916, so this story must be false.

 

Jimmy Porter, pictured third from left seated on the bleachers, was known for advocating for youth baseball. (Courtesy of the City of Carrollton)

 

Regardless of his playing career in baseball, we do know that Jimmy Porter was important in helping to found the Carrollton Little League in the 1950s and 1960s. How involved is difficult to know (he was, after all, a Black man in 1950s Texas), but in the late 1960s and 1970s he received several awards for his efforts in helping to start the league. To this day the Carrollton Parks and Recreation Department gives the Jimmy Porter Award for an outstanding volunteer in youth sports.

Many older citizens have remembered Jimmy in blog and Facebook posts over the years. They talk about him having just one rule: everyone gets to play. He was regularly seen on the streets of Carrollton, bat and ball in hand, heading somewhere to coach young ballplayers. Jimmy Porter was, in his time, the most famous person in Carrollton.

So who was Jimmy Porter? Was he one of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of men who have claimed to have been pro ballplayers, only to have that claim refuted as research proved them wrong? Everyone has heard a story of someone, perhaps even a relative, digging into the claims of an uncle or grandfather, only to discover they didn’t do what they said they did.

These claims harm no one. This is not a case of stolen valor, after all. A little stretching of a story here and there to inspire the local kids doesn’t really matter.

An article from 1975 may have gotten to the heart of the Jimmy Porter story without even realizing it. One paragraph may tell you all you need to know:

In the final reckoning, we know that at the very least Jimmy Porter was a very good man who was heavily involved in youth baseball, and influenced many people throughout his life. Some parts of his story are surely true, some completely false, and some embellished, but none take away from his legacy.

And that may be enough.

STEVE WEST is a freelance writer based in Carrollton, Texas. He has written numerous articles for the BioProject, and this is the third book he has edited for SABR. He has been a SABR member since 2006.

 

Acknowlegments

The author is grateful for the assistance of the City of Carrollton Parks and Recreation Department.

 

Notes

1. Most stories called him Jimmy, and that is how the park is named, but in autographs he wrote it as Jimmie, and that is how it is spelled on his gravestone. For the sake of continuity this article will refer to the way he was commonly known.

2. Much of the information in this article was based on old newspaper clippings found in archival boxes owned by the City of Carrollton. Some of them included sources, which are listed here when available, but most did not.

3. There is no record of Jimmy Porter in Negro League statistics on Baseball Reference or Seamheads.com, and Negro League experts consulted were unaware of his existence.

4. “Carrollton Youths Call Themselves ‘Lucky To Have Friend Like Jimmy,’“ undated article.

5. Steve Pate, “A Legend in his Own Town,” Dallas Morning News, 1975.

6. Pate.

7. “Although most Negro leaguers were paid less than their White counterparts in the major leagues they were much better off than their black contemporaries outside baseball.” Robert Gardner & Dennis Shortelle, The Forgotten Players: The Story of Black Baseball in America (NY: Walker and Company, 1993). https://nlbemuseum.com/nlbm/player2.html.

8. Dean Glazer, “Satchel Paige: Porter Reflects on Legend,” undated article. However, the Stars were the best-hitting team in the Negro National League for both those seasons, and with a batting average of .338 Porter would have only been about fifth on the team.

9. Glazer.

10. Pate.