So now we were in Cleveland for a season-closing six-game series, and before the first game I waited in the clubhouse until Jackson had taken his batting practice …. Ambling over, Joe gave me a grip and said, “How’s it goin’, brother Ty? How you been?”

I stared coldly at a point six inches over his head. Joe waited for an answer. The grin slowly faded from his face to be replaced by puzzlement.

“Gosh, Ty, what’s the matter with you?”

I turned and walked away. Jackson followed, still trying to learn why I’d ignored him.

“Get away from me!” I snarled.

Every inning afterward I arranged to pass close by him, each time giving him the deep freeze. For a while, Joe kept asking, “What’s wrong, Ty?” I never answered him. Finally, he quit speaking and just looked at me with hurt in his eyes.

My mind was centered on just one thing: getting all the base hits I could muster. Joe Jackson’s mind was on many other things. . . . We Tigers were leaving town, but I had to keep my psychological ploy going to keep Jackson upset the rest of the way.

So, after the last man was out, I walked up, gave him a broad smile and yodeled, “Why, hello, Joe – how’s your good health?” I slapped his back and complimented him on his fine season’s work.

Joe’s mouth was open when I left.

Final standings: Cobb .420 batting mark, Jackson, .408.

It helps if you help them beat themselves.

— From “My Life in Baseball: The True Record,” by Ty Cobb with Al Stumpf

*****

TY COBB PSYCHING OUT JOE JACKSON to win the 1911 American League batting championship is one of baseball’s most memorable anecdotes. There are many versions of the story, varying in details, but all agree on the basic plot. There’s only one problem with the story: It never happened.

A glance at Figure 1 on the 1911 batting race shows why. The day-by-day records of that season reveal that Cobb passed Jackson on May 7 and never again fell behind. From May 15 to July 2 Cobb hit .482 while putting together a 40-game hitting streak – an American League record at the time – and raising his average to . 44 7. At the same time Jackson was hitting a very respectable .378, which nevertheless left him 69 points behind.

Jackson picked up his pace in July, running up a 28-game streak between July 11 and August 12. Jackson’s average climbed over .400 on August 8, and the gap narrowed to 22 points. By August 25 Jackson was only nine points behind Cobb, but he never came any closer.

To salvage the legend, one could assume that rather than having come from behind Cobb used his psychological ploy to derail the onrushing Jackson and preserve his narrow lead in the batting race. But even this interpretation doesn’t stand up. Detroit and Cleveland played their last three games against each other on October 2 and 4 in Cleveland. Going into this series Cobb had a 15-point lead in the batting race (.422 to .407). The possibility of Jackson overtaking Cobb’s lead at that late date could not have been very great, and Cobb had no need to apply psychological pressure.

The only other time Cobb and Jackson met during the last three months of 1911 was for a single exciting game in Detroit on September 10, the kind of game that produced the Cobb legend. The Georgia Peach singled in the first inning but was stranded. after stealing second and third. Cleveland scored the game’s first run in the seventh when Nap Lajoie doubled home Jackson. Detroit tied it with two away in the eighth; Cobb beat out an infield hit, continued to second when the late throw to first base was high and streaked for third when the pitcher, after retrieving the ball, threw to second. When the Cleveland second baseman threw wildly to third, Cobb tore home and slid around the catcher, scoring on his own infield hit. Cobb beat out another infield hit in the thirteenth inning and was on second base, with the bases loaded, when Detroit scored the winning run on an error.

At that point Cobb’s lead over Jackson was 14 points (.420 to .406). With one month remaining in the season the possibility that Jackson might overtake Cobb was considerably better than it would be on October 2. However, if Cobb snubbed Jackson on September 10, it certainly didn’t work. From then to the end of the season Cobb hit .422, hardly the pace of a psyched-up demon. Over the same period Jackson hit .420, hardly the dramatic decline of a befuddled bumpkin.

So the whole story could be a myth, a tale fashioned out of Cobb’s megalomania to embroider his already larger-than-life legend.

Or is it?

After all, 1911 wasn’t the only year that Jackson finished close behind Cobb in the batting race. They also were 1-2 in 1912 and 1913. Maybe one of those years provides support for the story.

BUT AS SHOWN IN Figure 2, the 1912 season looks no more promising as support for the legend than 1911. Jackson started slowly, but in June he hit a blistering .529, raising his average from .308 to .404. As hot as Jackson was in June, Cobb was even hotter in July. He hit .535 for the month, passed the slumping Jackson on July 10 and kept the lead for the remainder of the season.

As part of his July binge, Cobb challenged his own year-old record by compiling a 34-game hitting streak, which was snapped when he went 0-for-4 against Walter Johnson on July 22. That was the only game between June 16 and August 7 in which Cobb didn’t get a hit, and thus he barely missed a 50-game streak which could have made life a little more difficult for Joe DiMaggio 29 years later.

The next-to-last Detroit-Cleveland series of 1912 was played on July 1-2-3. Starting with that series, Cobb went on his July tear and Jackson fell into a slump. While at first glance this period might appear to have been the setting of Cobb’s legendary trick, it seems to be much too early in the season to be a realistic candidate. Even if Cobb had had the idea that early, it seems reasonable that he would have saved it for a more propitious occasion. The only other time that 1912 might have been an appropriate setting for Cobb’s ploy was during the Detroit-Cleveland series of September 24 (in Detroit) and September 26-29 (in Cleveland). But Cobb went into that series with a 21-point lead, and again it was clearly too late for Jackson to challenge him. So the 1912 records do not support Cobb’s story.

A look at 1913, however, provides an entirely different – and more promising – picture. In fact, 1913 fulfills all of the important conditions of Cobb’s story except the specific reference to 1911.

Figure 3 reveals that both Cobb and Jackson started the ’13 season with hot bats. Jackson even had another of those .500 months, hitting .505 in May. Cobb missed the first few weeks of the season because he was holding out, but once he was back in the Tiger lineup he made opposing pitchers wish he had never settled. As June opened Cobb was batting .452 and Jackson .450.

Both hitters gradually declined from those early peaks. But Jackson was the batting leader all through the summer. Except for August 23 and 30 Jackson led every day from June 5 through September 8-or 94 of 96 days. This prolonged period in which he was overshadowed by his principal batting rival must have been infinitely irritating to Cobb, who by this time had come to regard the batting championship as something of a personal possession. It must have been particularly galling to Cobb that, with Jackson’s average slipping, he was missing good opportunities to take the lead. As the Tigers pulled into Cleveland for the start of a four-game series on September 4, it can be assumed that a brooding Cobb, still trailing Jackson by seven points, was prepared to take extreme measures to change the situation.

AND CHANGE IT DID. Cobb did not hit particularly well during the Cleveland series ( which shifted to Detroit on September 6), but he hit a furious .450 the remainder of the way to raise his average from .381 to .390. On the other hand Jackson skidded into a miserable slump. From September 4 to October 1 he hit only . 256 (compared to .365 during the previous month) as his average slipped from .388 to .369. During and just after the Detroit series he was at his worst, hitting only .194 over a ten-game stretch. Jackson no doubt gained some satisfaction by going 5-for-6 in his final two games (October 4-5) and raising his season mark to .3 73, but by then the batting championship had been irretrievably lost.

But the question remains: Did Ty Cobb really snub Joe Jackson and thereby win a batting championship? The answer to that question must not only consider the facts, but must also take into account that establishing a cause-and-effect relationship in this kind of a situation is difficult if not impossible. There might have been, after all, other reasons for Cobb’s late surge and Jackson’s late slump in 1913. What can be said, however, is that if Cobb did snub Jackson, he did it not in 1911 but during that four-game series in early September 1913, and that the results appear to have been as effective as he claimed.

But what about protests of games? They can present extremely sticky situations, especially when they involve a powerful organization such as the New York Yankees. Just ask Lee MacPhail. The famous George Brett pine-tar incident will forever remain vividly etched in his memory.

An earlier American League president, William Har­ridge, was called upon to rule on three protested games involving the Yankees. In two instances he sided with the opposing team. One can imagine the reactions of the New York club’s management. On the other occasion he ruled in the Yankees’ favor. All three protests, especially the first, resulted in unusual ramifications affecting baseball’s records. Some publications still count the three games as ties and credit the Yankees with having played 85 tie games in their 83-year history when they actually have had only 82.

The first of the three protested games led by far to the most confusion among the sport’s record-keepers. Even today the achievement of one Hall of Famer is listed incorrectly because of a mixup dating back to that contest.

The disputed game took place in Detroit on August 1, 1932. The Yankees that season were en route to their first of eight pennants under manager Joe McCarthy. Earl Whitehill started on the mound for the Tigers against Danny MacFayden. Although Tony Lazzeri had batted No. 5 and Ben Chapman sixth for some time, the Yan­kees’ official lineup this day had them reversed. Nevertheless, in the second inning Lazzeri went to the plate as New York’s fifth batter and, suspecting something was amiss, asked umpire Dick Nallin whose turn it was. Told the lineup card showed Chapman should be up, Lazzeri claimed a mistake had been made, and McCarthy was summoned from the dugout. He explained he had erred in filling out the lineup card and asked Nallin to permit him to switch the two names. The umpire consented.

When Lazzeri proceeded to single, Detroit manager Bucky Harris rushed onto the field. He contended Lazzeri should be out for batting out of turn. Nallin disagreed, holding that a change could be made in the batting order if it was followed throughout the game. Harris then announced he was playing the contest under protest. When the Yankees went on to win, 6-3, the protest wound up on Harridge’s desk.

Several weeks later the A. L. president ruled in favor of Detroit, pointing out that Nallin had no right to approve a change in the official lineup. Harridge ordered the game played over in its entirety. The replay, set up as part of a September 8 doubleheader, ended in a 7-7 tie because of darkness, but Detroit posted a 4-1 victory when the game was played over the next day.

Record-keepers at the Howe News Bureau, the league’s official statistician at the time, entered all of the figures from the August 1 protested game on the individual player sheets. So far so good. But in tallying up the players’ statistics at the end of the season the Howe statisticians did not credit any of the the 23 players who participated in the contest with a game played although they did count their at-bats, hits, innings pitched, etc., from the game, including a victory for MacFayden and a defeat for White ­ hill. The team records were handled in similar fashion.

As a consequence, the official 1932 American League averages issued by Howe and published in the Baseball Guides show Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig with 132 and 155 games played, respectively, when in reality they appeared in 133 and 156 contests. It wasn’t until four years later — during the winter of 1936-37 — that this nonsensical situation was rectified, at least in part, by crediting Ruth, Gehrig and several others with an additional game. Ironically, compilers of the initial edition of The Base­ball Encyclopedia became caught in the same trap.

In looking over the Guides or the official player sheets, they picked up the original incorrect game totals. The upshot was that the first (1969) issue of the publication showed Gehrig, for instance, with 155 games in 1932 and a career total of 2,163 — rather than 2,164. This in effect also trimmed The Iron Horse’s consecutive-game streak of 2,130 by one. Fortunately, the games totals of Ruth, Gehrig, Charlie Gehringer, Gee Walker and the three pitchers — MacFayden, Whitehill and Whit Wyatt — were corrected before the second edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia appeared, but the most recent edition still has the wrong games totals for the 16 other players. The confusion arising from the August 1, 1932 pro­tested game also is reflected in another way in some current record books. Because of the mixup they give an erroneous figure for a notable accomplishment. Gehring­er, one of two players to own a pair of streaks of 500 or more consecutive games, is shown with skeins of 511 and 504 contests. Actually the latter streak covered 505 contests, counting the protested game. The iron-man skein began June 25, 1932 and extended through August 11, 1935.

The next protested Yankee game occurred on August 6, 1937. It was played in Yankee Stadium with Cleveland providing the opposition. Bob Feller went into the bottom of the ninth inning with a 5-2 lead, but New York rallied to knot the score. In the tenth Hal Trosky, tagged reliever Johnny Murphy for a homer to give the Indians a 6-5 edge.

Myril Hoag led off the New York tenth with a single. After Arndt Jorgens was sent up to pinch-hit for Murphy, Cleveland manager Steve O’Neill pulled Feller in favor of Joe Heving. Jack Saltzgaver then replaced Jorgens as the Yankee hitter. After failing twice to sacrifice, Saltzgaver singled sharply to right field, moving Hoag to second base. Frank Crosetti followed with a sacrifice to advance both runners. Red Rolfe, next up, was called out on a controversial third strike for the second out.

The Yankees’ hopes now rested with Joe DiMaggio, who was 0-for-2 with three walks. He ran the count to 3-2 against Heving before lining a drive toward third baseman Odell Hale. The sharply hit ball caromed off his glove and sailed down the line, rolling into foul territory in left field for an apparent game-winning two-run double.

However, plate umpire Charlie Johnston signaled foul ball. This brought McCarthy racing from the dugout. After arguing briefly, the Yankee manager induced Johnston to consult with third base umpire George Moriarty.

Informed by Moriarty that the ball had struck Hale’s glove — a fact the plate umpire apparently had not seen because the batter blocked his vision — and that the Cleveland third baseman was three feet in fair territory at the time, Johnston reversed himself and ruled the DiMaggio drive a fair ball, giving New York a 7-6 victory.

Now it was O’Neill’s turn to storm at the umpires. He charged that Johnston’s original call and gestures indi­cating the ball was foul caused left fielder Moose Salters to slow his pursuit and thereby deprived the Indians of a possible chance to cut down the winning run at the plate. When his argument proved fruitless, the Cleveland skip­per filed an official protest with the league office. Har­ridge subsequently upheld the claim and ordered the game replayed on September 15 as part of a doubleheader.

The Yankees themselves did the protesting in the last of the three disputed games — and emerged victorious. Following four successive world championships, the Bronx Bombers found themselves struggling in June of 1940. When they took the field at Comiskey Park on June 20, they were in the throes of a losing streak which reached five that day, with three of the defeats coming in Chicago. Tempers among the Yankees personnel under­standably were getting shorter and shorter.

Monte Pearson opened on the mound for New York that afternoon against Johnny Rigney. The pair hooked up in a brilliant duel. In the second inning Bill Dickey lofted a long foul fly to left field. Moose Salters, a central figure in the earlier protested contest, raced over and gloved the ball. As he grabbed it, his cap fell off, and in reaching for the headgear he dropped the ball, but umpire John Quinn ruled he had made a legal catch. McCarthy came steaming onto the field to dispute the call but to no avail. He subsequently protested the game.

Meantime, with Rigney tossing a five-hitter and extending the Yankees’ runless streak to 20 innings, the game remained scoreless going into the bottom of the eleventh. Pearson, who had permitted nine hits up to that point, saw Mike Tresh lead off the eleventh with a single. After Rigney sacrificed, Bob Kennedy singled Tresh across for Chicago’s second successive 1-0 victory.

Unfortunately for the White Sox, league president Harridge ruled in favor of the Yankees’ protest. He held that Quinn’s contention that Salters dropped the ball in the act of throwing was not supported by the three other umpires. Although no pitcher was given a victory or defeat in the 1937 Yankee-Cleveland protested game, Rigney was credited with a win and Pearson tagged with a loss in the 1940 game. As a result that year’s averages listed Rigney with a 15-18 record and Pearson with 7-6. It wasn’t until several years later that the record books corrected their records to 14-18 and 7-5, respectively.

There is no question that, overall, modern athletes are superior to their predecessors. Athletes today are bigger, stronger and faster. If Johnny Weismuller, on his finest day in the 100-meter freestyle race, had swum through a timewarp into the 1972 Olympics, he would have found himself eight seconds behind Mark Spitz. Jesse Owens would not come within two feet of the longest jump by modern star Carl Lewis. Glenn Cunningham would finish a couple of hundred yards behind Sebastian Coe in the mile run. In this century, most record times and distances have been improved by 15 to 25 percent, and several by much more.

Why, then, is baseball the one major sport in which measurable numerical records have endured for many decades? This, I hope to prove, is not because today’s players are inferior; it is because the game is so different and the level of competition today is so much higher.

Advocates of the modern player list a number of factors that have made the game more difficult, particularly for hitters: Night baseball, relief specialists, the slider, bigger gloves, increased media pressure, cross-country travel and jet lag.

Supporters of the oldtimer often cite expansion as a reason for the watering down of talent in the big leagues. “By sheer numbers,” wrote. one, “one-third of today’s (players) wouldn’t be in the major leagues if it weren’t for expansion …”

And that’s where we have them. A statement like that fails to consider the impact of the United States population – which has tripled in this century – on baseball’s level of competition.

The accompanying graph introduces the “Level of Competition Index ” (LCI), which indicates the relative degree of difficulty of a man making it to the major leagues at a given time and, simultaneously, reflects the depth of talent in the majors.

LCI is arrived at by dividing the number of major league baseball players at a given time by the number of pro baseball candidates (in millions) at the same time. The number of players is defined as the number of major­-league-level teams in existence (according to The Baseball Encyclopedia, Macmillan) times 25, the current standard. roster size. (Yes, rosters were smaller in the 1800s and early 1900s.) Pro baseball candidates, for the purpose of this computation, are defined as “United States males aged 20-39 years,” for which the data have been supplied by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Since the census is taken only every ten years, population estimates for the intervening years had to be made based on each particular decade’s rate of growth.

Therefore, an LCI of 25.0 means that there were 15 major league players per one million “candidates.” The lower the LCI, the higher the level of talent.

Table 1: United States Males, Aged 20-39 Years, 1870-1980

Source: US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census

Since 1876, the advent of what is usually recognized as major league baseball, the highest LCI ever recorded occurred a century ago. The addition of four teams to the existing American Association in 1884, plus the single­-year existence of the eight-team Union Association, gave the big leagues 28 teams and brought the LCI to a whopping 78.9. The lowest LCI ever was the 16.0 mark of 1900, one year before the American League claimed major league status.

With the inception of the current two-league format in 1901 – the beginning of the “modern era” – the LCI stood at 31.2. That number shrunk slowly but steadily for half a century, dropping to 25.1 in 1910, 23.1 in 1920, 20.5 in 1930, 19.0 in 1940 and 17.5 in 1950, before levelling off to 17.8 in 1960. (While overall population had grown 18.5 percent in the 1950s, the 20-39 age group actually decreased in number due to the low birthrate of the Depression years.)

The 1960s saw the formation of eight new teams – the Los Angeles Angels and the new Washington Senators in 1961 (the old Senators had moved to Minnesota and become the Twins); the Houston Colt .45s and New York Mets in 1962, and the Kansas City Royals, Seattle Pilots, Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in 1969. (The Colt .45s became the Astros in 1965, the Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, and the Senators became the Texas Rangers in 1972.) With this 50 percent expansion of the big leagues, while the talent pool increased by only 13.4 percent during the decade, the LCI jumped to 23.8, the highest since World War I.

The maturing of the “baby boom” generation, however, swiftly reversed that effect over the next decade. The male 20-39 age group grew by an astonishing 40.6 percent during the 1970s, while the number of major leaguers – with the addition of the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays in 1977 – increased only 8.3 percent. This set of circumstances brought the LCI back down to 18.1 by 1980, or about the same as the immediate pre-­expansion levels. And with the continuing population growth since the last census, it is altogether probable that the LCI is right now at the lowest point since 1900 – which means that the level of talent in the big leagues today is the highest of this century.

Table 2: Number of Major League Baseball Teams, 1876-1984

This, of course, takes into account only factors of population and expansion. There are other bases to touch.

As many people have pointed out, baseball was, for many years, virtually the only sport in which a talented athlete could hope to perform for financial gain. There are at least two counters to that contention.

First, only a select few players really made a decent living playing ball in those days; there were no dreams of multi-million contracts. For example, a star sandlot player of the 1930s (my father) told me he had to refuse a minor league contract offer because he could not live on $20 a month. The point is, many good athletes couldn’t afford to consider a pro sports career, baseball or otherwise.

Second, probably most of the potential baseball players who have opted for other pro sports are either basketball players or skill position football players – and the vast majority of those athletes would not have been allowed to play baseball between 1887 and 1947 because they are black. This leads us to the integration factor.

We have already established that, based on population data alone (“sheer numbers”), the number of major leaguers per million candidates has dropped from 31 in 1901 to 18 in 1980. But were those 31 of ’01 the best baseball players in existence? No, they were the best white players. Meanwhile, of the 18 in 1980, perhaps 12 are white.

So, considering the integration factor on top of the population factor, we can say that only about two-fifths of the 1901 players would be good enough to make it to the big leagues today. (And with the much-improved overall caliber of the modern athlete, that fraction would be much smaller.) In a normal distribution (bell) curve of baseball ability, the line separating non-players and minor leaguers from major leaguers is moving farther and farther to the right.

What this tells us is that, by today’s standards, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, et al, were hurling against lineups of mostly minor-league-level hiters and Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Rogers Hornsby and company were batting against mostly minor-league-level pitchers. These Hall of Famers would have excelled in any era, but their individual statistics were embellished by the low levels of talent of the rank and file players of their times.

This leaves us only to speculate: What kind of numbers could have been put on the board by the likes of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Rod Carew, Pete Rose, Steve Carton and Tom Seaver had they played under similar conditions as these oldtime heroes?

By common agreement among Black old-timers, Charleston was the greatest all-around player in the annals of the Negro Leagues. His modern counterpart would be Willie Mays, who played with a similar panache.

In 1921, Charleston had a year that not even Cobb, the Georgia Peach, could match. Oscar hit .434 in 60 games against the top Black teams and led the Negro National League (NNL) in batting, home runs, triples, and stolen bases.

These figures are the result of hundreds of hours of research by dedicated SABR members and others who pored over miles of microfilm of both Black and White newspapers in seven cities. It is part of an ongoing project to compile the most complete statistics possible for the Negro National League for the 1920–1929 period. Future projects will seek to cover the Eastern Colored League for the same decade, then move on to the Negro League data for the 1930s and 1940s. We feel confident that we have found every box score that still exists for the year 1921, although unfortunately many were apparently not published and presumably will never be found.

As compiled by project editor Dick Clark, here are the highlights of that year:

It was the second season of the new league, which was founded in the winter of 1919-20 by Rube Foster of the Chicago American Giants, J.L. Wilkinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, and owners of other midwestern Black clubs. Foster’s American Giants won the first pennant in 1920 with ease.

As the clubs took spring training for the new season, one key sale was announced. The Indianapolis ABC’s (named for the American Brewing Company, which owned them) sold their star outfielder, Charleston, to the St. Louis Giants. Charleston started fast for his new club, smashing two home runs and four singles in one game against the Chicago Giants (not the American Giants).

His feat was almost matched in the same game by Giants’ rookie John Beckwith, who hit a home run, triple, and two singles in five at-bats. Beckwith, a moody man but a formidable slugger, would go on to become one of the four or five top home-run hitters of Negro League history. His name would be mentioned along with those of Josh Gibson, Mule Suttles, Turkey Stearnes, and Willard Brown.

Nine days after his duel with Charleston, Beckwith arrived in Cincinnati’s Redland Field for a game against the Cuban Stars. Beck smashed a drive over the left field wall just a few feet from the large clock. It was the first ball ever hit over the new barrier. Fans showered the promising youngster with coins and dollar bills as he crossed home plate.

St. Louis hitters terrorized the league that year largely because of the strange dimensions of the club’s home field, which was built beside the trolley car barn. The barn cut across left field, leaving a short fence at the foul line. The fence quickly dropped back to a deep center field. Righthanded hitters had a great time aiming at the barn. Although Charleston was a lefty, he hit to all fields, and there is no way of knowing how much the short left-field fence helped him.

Foster’s American Giants moved to the head of the league again, using Rube’s unusual style of bunt-and-run offense combined with the finest pitching in the league. They finished last in league batting, with only one legitimate slugger, the Cuban Cristobal Torriente, who hit .330 that year and is usually included on most authorities’ all-time all-Black team along with Charleston. Bingo DeMoss, perhaps the best Black second baseman ever; Dave Malarcher, Jimmy Lyons, and Jelly Gardner represented the Rube Foster style, getting on base any way they could, bunting, hitting, and running, and waiting for Torriente to knock them in. Lyons was a veteran of Rube’s earlier Chicago Leland Giants. He had served in the U.S. Army in France in World War I, playing against Ty Cobb’ brother. In July Lyons fell 25 feet down an elevator shaft, but he was back on the field four days later. The accident didn’t affect his hitting; he ended up batting .388 for the year.

Besides their speed, the American Giants were first in pitching effectiveness. Tom Williams had a record of 10-5. Dave Brown, the ex-convict whom some consider the best Black lefty of all time, compiled a 10-3 record. One of his victories was a one-hitter against the hard-hitting Monarchs. (Brown would later kill a man in a barroom fight, flee to the West and drop out of sight forever.)

Foster, one of the shrewdest men ever to direct a baseball team, gave signals from the bench with his meerschaum pipe and used his team’s speed and pitching to outplay the hard-hitting clubs. Yet oddly, in spite of their reputation, the American Giants stole few bases if the box scores are to be believed. Chicago relied on speed, but apparently Foster capitalized on it by taking the extra base on batted balls.

For example, in a game against Indianapolis in June the Giants were down, 18-0, so Foster threw away all the books. He ordered his “rabbits” to lay down 11 bunts, including six squeeze plays in a row. Torriente blasted a grand-slam and catcher George Dixon hit another as the Giants scored nine runs in the eighth and nine more in the ninth to gain an 18-18 tie!

League teams played six games a week Saturday through Wednesday, including Sunday and holiday doubleheaders, from May through August. Some clubs played more games than others. The Chicago Giants, the weakest club in the league, played only 38 league contests, according to our count (which differs somewhat from the officially published standings), and spent most of their time barnstorming against White semipro teams. By contrast, the Kansas City Monarchs played 77 league games.

As the July heat descended on the Midwest, the American Giants clung to a slim lead over the hard-hitting Monarchs. Kansas City was led by pitcher Bullet Joe Rogan, the little ex-soldier who had been discovered by Casey Stengel while playing on a Black infantry team in Arizona two years earlier. Little Joe was already more than 30 years old but still one of the all-time stars of blackball history. Most Monarch veterans who saw him insist he was a better pitcher than Satchel Paige, the man who succeeded him as ace of the Monarch staff. Rogan posted a 14-7 record in 1921 and completed all 20 games he started.

Rogan was also a great hitter, though his average that year was only .266. He showed his power in one game, blasting a home run, triple and double in four at-bats against the Cubans.

There was only one no-hitter that summer. It was turned in by Big Bill Gatewood of third-place St. Louis. Six years later Bill would manage the Birmingham Black Barons when a skinny rookie named Satchel Paige joined the club. Satch credited Gatewood with teaching him the “hesitation pitch,” which became one of Paige’s best-known trademarks.

Another St. Louis hurler that year, Bill “Plunk” Drake, always claimed that Satch had learned the “hesitation pitch” from him. Drake had a magnificent season in 1921. St. Louis finished with 40 victories, and Drake was credited with 18 of them to lead the league. That is equal to at least 30 wins in the major leagues’ present 162-game schedule.

The Detroit Stars finished fourth, led by outfielder-manager Pete Hill and catcher Bruce Petway. Hill was a veteran of the great Philadelphia Giants team of 1906, which also boasted Foster, Charlie “Chief Tokahoma” Grant, who had tried to join John McGraw’s Baltimore Orioles in 1902 as an Indian, and young John Henry Lloyd. The Giants challenged the winner of the 1906 Cubs-White Sox World Series to a series to determine the championship of the United States. The challenge was never accepted.

Though few persons are still living who personally saw Hill play and none who saw him in his prime, many who did see him put him on their all-time all-Black outfield alongside Charleston and Torriente. In 1921, Hill could still hit; his .373 average was one of the best in the league. Petway was considered one of the two best Black catchers of all time by those who saw him play. In November 1910, he faced Cobb in Havana an threw Ty out on attempted steals three straight times. On the third try, Ty saw that the throw had him beat and merely turned and ran back into the dugout. Petway, usually a banjo hitter, also out-hit Ty, .412 to .369, and Cobb stomped off the field vowing never to play against Blacks again

Unfortunately, injuries to Hill and to slugging first baseman Edgar Wesley hurt the Detroiters and they failed to mount a challenge for the pennant.

The ABCs, who had sold their top player, Charleston, finished fifth, although they had a great future star in catcher Raleigh “Biz” Mackey, up from Texas. The switch-hitting Mackey hit .289 that year and his seven home runs were third highest in the league. He would develop eventually into the man considered—at least by all who didn’t see Petway—as the best catcher in Black baseball annals. Later Josh Gibson outhit him, but Black vets would have put Josh in the outfield in order to have Mackey behind the plate. After Mackey moved to Philadelphia, he was often compared to Mickey Cochrane.

In 1938, Mackey took a youngster named Roy Campanella and taught him all of his secrets. Later, Charleston urged Branch Rickey to sign Campy to a Brooklyn Dodger contract. The ABC first baseman was Ben Taylor, and again a generational debate rages as to whether he or his latter-day pupil, Buck Leonard, was the finest Black first baseman of all time. Taylor’s 1921 batting average, .415, was third best in the league.

On August 21, Indianapolis pitching ace Harry Kenyon hooked up in a 17-inning duel with Jose LeBlanc of the Cubans. Both went the distance and Kenyon won, 6-5.

The Cubans finished sixth in the league. As usual they had some fine players but were handicapped by a weak bench. Most Black clubs carried 16 men; the Cubans had only 14. Pitchers got no relief and indeed often played the outfield between starts. LeBlanc started and finished all 18 games for which records could be found and ended with a 13-7 mark. Outfielder Bernardo Barό hit .347. Several years later he teamed with Martin Dihigo and Pablo Mesa to form one of the greatest defensive outfields of all time.

In 1921, Barό played next to Ramon Herrera, who hit .218. Four years later, Herrera would be playing in the American League with the Boston Red Sox, where he batted .385 in 10 games.

Another veteran of the 1906 Giants, John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, had been installed by Foster as manager of the Columbus Buckeyes. Next to the Chicago Giants, the Buckeyes were the weakest team in the league, but Lloyd, then 35 years old, had a great season. He went four-for-four in one game against the Cubans and ended up hitting .337. He also finished third in stolen bases behind youngsters Charleston and Torriente.

The last-place Chicago Giants had only one noteworthy performer, Beckwith. The next year both the Giants and the Buckeyes dropped out of the league.

Several clubs played non-league series against the best Black clubs in the still-unorganized East, teams such as the Philadelphia Hilldales and the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City

These exhibition games are a bonanza for historians because the only records that are available for the great stars in the East, such as shortstop Dick Lundy, third baseman Oliver Marcelle, and pitcher Cannonball Dick Redding, are for games played against the Western teams. Lundy hit .484 in 17 contests. Marcelle hit .303 in 28 games and Redding had a won-lost record of 7-9.

The Eastern teams would form their own league in 1923, raiding Foster’s circuit of many of its stars, including Charleston, Dave Brown, Mackey, and Lloyd.

Meanwhile, a Black minor league, the Negro Southern League, played its first season in 1921. The Montgomery Gray Sox won the pennant, led by willowy Norman “Turkey” Stearnes, who soon moved up to the Detroit Stars and became one of the great sluggers of Black history.

As the NNL season headed down the stretch early in September, the American Giants still clung to a half-game lead over the Monarchs with six games left between the two leaders. They split the six contests, and Foster’s men went on to win the championship again.

Rube took his team east by private Pullman to the scene of his great exploits with the X-Giants almost 20 years earlier. Against the Hilldales and future Hall of Famer Judy Johnson, Lyons singled, stole second, third, and home. In all, the American Giants stole nine bases, Torriente slugged a homer, and Chicago won the game, 5-2. Tom Shibe, the owner of the park, shook his head. “Now Mr. Foster,” he marveled, “how do you make them move so on the bases?”

Chicago lost the next three games, then played the Bacharachs and split eight decisions with them.

Meanwhile, Charleston and the St. Louis Giants were playing the Cardinals, who won the first game in Sportsman’s Park, 5-4, in 11 innings. The next day Oscar hit a home run to help beat Jesse Haines, 6-2. The Cards won the last three games.

Next Charleston traveled to Indianapolis to play a White all-star squad. He went two-for-four against Brooklyn’s Jess Petty, including a ninth-inning home run that tied the game as the St. Louis Giants went on to win, 8-3. In six games against White Major League pitching that fall, Charleston got nine hits in 27 at-bats with two home runs to climax a great season.

A Statistical Labor of Love

(Editor’s note: Clark and Holway were writing in 1985. To get an idea how far the compilation of Black baseball statistics has come in the meantime, see the Seamheads Negro League Database, which as of January 2020 included a full report on the major Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948, with other years’ research ongoing.)

The Negro League research project is an on-going labor of love that began around 1975 and has involved many fans, both in and out of SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), who have given of their time, money, and energy.

Batting and pitching statistics occasionally were printed in the Black press, but on inspection they turned out to be suspect. As a result, the SABR Negro Leagues Committee plans to recompile the data for every season, both those with and without published stats.

Negro League research carries problems not faced by other researchers. The records are scattered among many newspapers, both Black and White. Rarely did papers name winning and losing pitchers; these have had to be supplied by researchers using their best guesstimates. Some papers ran box scores without at-bats; these had to be estimated. Others did not include extra-base hits; when possible, these data were obtained from the game accounts. Sometimes all that is available is a line score, and, of course, for some games not even this was shown. Still, enough box scores have been found to begin to build a portrait in numbers of the great men of the Black leagues.

Despite its frustrations, the project carries rewards perhaps not found in other research. This is the last frontier of baseball exploration, a virgin continent of history and heroes as rich as that of the better-known and already well-traveled land of White baseball history.

Among those who have contributed to the project are Terry Baxter, John Bourg and family, C. Baylor Butler, Dick Clark, Harry Conwell, Dick Cramer, Deborah Crawford, Paul Doherty, Garrett Finney, Troy Greene, Richard Hall, John B. Holway, John Holway Jr., Merl Kleinknecht, Jerry Malloy, Joe McGillen, Bill Plott, Susan Scheller, Mike Stahl, and Charles Zarelli.