Cieradkowski: Bob Bowman: Integrating baseball below the Mason-Dixon Line

From SABR member Gary Cieradkowski Jr. at The Infinite Baseball Card Set on October 17, 2014:

Who was the first black ballplayer signed to play for a team below the Mason-Dixon Line?

I figured it was someone from the Brooklyn Dodgers organization and I racked my brain trying to come up with a good candidate. I forget now who I threw out there, but it didn’t matter, I was wrong. “The answer”, said the old fella, “was a pitcher named Bob Bowman in 1951”.

I confessed I never heard of him before and dutifully noted his name in my pocket sketchbook, filing Bob Bowman away for future research. Months later I was in the Cincinnati Public Library and I stumbled on the little note. I got a stack of old Spalding Guides from the reference desk and micro film of The Sporting News and looked up Bob Bowman. I found he’d played for the Middlesboro Athletics of the Class D Mountain States League in 1951. It was at the tail end of a long career in organized baseball stretching back to the 1930’s including a 4 year stretch in the majors with the Cardinals, Giants and Cubs. Clearly Bob Bowman was not black, but white. In fact he carved out his own niche in baseball infamy as the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher who beaned Joe Medwick in 1940. Medwick was the National League’s best slugger at the time and was never the same after Bowman brained him. The injury, besides being horrific even by the rough standards of the day, was significant in that it brought about he adaptation of modern batting helmets.

So, Bob Bowman was indeed an interesting guy, but not a pioneer of baseball integration. A dead end – or so I thought.

Read the full article here: http://www.infinitecardset.blogspot.com/2014/10/180-bob-bowman-integrating-dixie.html



Originally published: October 20, 2014. Last Updated: October 20, 2014.