Whirty: Dave Malarcher on Negro Leagues great Bill Foster
From SABR member Ryan Whirty at Home Plate Don’t Move on March 16, 2015:
The first item up is a letter I uncovered at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. It’s part of the Old Timer’s Baseball Club collection — files donated by local NOLA blackball and education fixture Walter Wright, the founder and president of the club and, while he was alive, a leading “keeping of the flame” of the memory of the Negro Leagues in these parts.
The 1968 letter is from Gentleman Dave Malarcher, who was then living in retirement as a real estate agent in his adopted “second hometown” of Chicago, to Wright, describing what Dave believes was one of the greatest displays of pitching he ever witnessed — a effort put on by future Hall of Famer Bill “Willie” Foster while both Foster and Malarcher were with the famed Chicago American Giants. In the letter to Wright, Gentleman called it simply “Willie’s greatest single performance in the box, and my greatest thrill as a manager.”
He describes the year when the two Negro National League split-season champs — the American Giants and the K.C. Monarchs — played a nine-game playoff to determine who would go on to the Negro World Series against the best team in the East. That would have been the 1926 season, when Foster at one point reeled off 23 straight W’s.
Read the full article here: https://homeplatedontmove.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/malarcher-on-bill-foster/
Originally published: March 17, 2015. Last Updated: March 17, 2015.