Blowout Games in the Negro Leagues

This article appears in SABR’s “Baseball’s Biggest Blowout Games” (2020), edited by Bill Nowlin.

There are a number of blowout games in the Negro Leagues. Alan Cohen drew my attention to one such blowout. He wrote: “On May 31, 1943, the Homestead Grays defeated the Baltimore Elite Giants 17-0 at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC in front of 10,000 spectators.”1 That kicked off an appeal to SABR members seeking other Negro Leagues blowouts.

Kevin Johnson reported 10 Negro Leagues games listed on Seamheads.com.2 They are:

• September 11, 1928: St. Louis Stars 28, Memphis Red Sox 1, at Stars Park, St. Louis.
• August 21, 1943: Newark Eagles 26, New York Black Yankees 2, at Ruppert Stadium, Newark.
• May 3, 1947: Newark Eagles 24, New York Black Yankees 0, at Mitchell Stadium, Stamford, Connecticut.
• September 7, 1944: Philadelphia Stars 23, Atlanta Black Crackers 0, at Penmar Park, Philadelphia.
• August 31, 1924: St. Louis Stars 25, Cleveland Browns 3, at Stars Park, St. Louis.
• June 27, 1926: Hilldale Club 23, Newark Stars 1, at Ruppert Stadium, Newark.
• June 28, 1925: Harrisburg Giants 21, New York Lincoln Giants 0, at Catholic Protectory Oval, New York.
• April 25, 1943: Cleveland Buckeyes 24, New York Black Yankees 3, at Ducks Park, Dayton, Ohio
• July 16, 1944: Newark Eagles 21, New York Black Yankees 0, at Ruppert Stadium, Newark.
• May 21, 1945: Birmingham Black Barons 23, Memphis Red Sox 2, at McCulloch Park, Muncie, Indiana.

Gary Ashwill sent a clipping from the St. Louis Argus. The September 11, 1928, game was the fourth of a four-game series between the Stars and the Memphis Red Sox. Memphis won the first game, 8-6. In a Monday doubleheader, St. Louis won the first game, 15-8, but lost the second, 6-3. The article reports: “The Stars swamped the Red Sox in the final game Tuesday 28 to 1. No official boxscore of the game was recorded.”3 Gary suggested that perhaps the scorekeeper simply gave up and didn’t compile a box score.

Jim Overmyer noted three games involving the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants of the Eastern Colored League.4

• June 23, 1924: Bacharach Giants 20, Cuban Stars 0, at Atlantic City.
• July 9, 1928: Bacharach Giants 21, Baltimore Black Sox 1, at Atlantic City.
• April 24, 1929: Baltimore Black Sox 21, Bacharach Giants 4, at Richmond, Virginia.

Bill Plott noted a number of games:

• May 4, 1937: Birmingham 19, St. Louis 3.
• July 11, 1937: Birmingham 20, St. Louis 4.
• July 22, 1945: Indianapolis 19, Jacksonville 1 (at Birmingham).
• May 30, 1948: Chattanooga 17, Birmingham Clowns 0 (Negro Southern League).
• June 24, 1950: Birmingham 16, Cleveland 0 (at Huntsville, Alabama).

And then he added, “But here is the champion,” and contributed information about one of the most remarkable days in professional baseball history.5 He was right. The June 9, 1946, games won by the Asheville Blues are the champions.

The Blues first joined the eight-team Negro Southern League in 1945, having been an independent league team before that. The Negro Southern League was, in effect, a minor-league circuit, one that Bill Plott called “a prodigious team in a weak league.”6

The league (in existence most of the time during the years 1920-51) produced five members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame: Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, Hilton Smith, Norman “Turkey” Stearnes, and George “Mule ” Suttles.7

On June 9, 1946, the Asheville (North Carolina) Blues took two games from the Montgomery (Alabama) Dodgers, and did so definitively.

• Asheville Blues 24, Montgomery Dodgers 0 (first game).
• Asheville Blues 22, Montgomery Dodgers 0 (second game).

Both games were reported as no-hitters for Asheville. No box scores have yet been found for the games, but the June 10 Asheville Citizen offered this lead paragraph in its brief story: “Their moundsmen pitching two no hit, no run games, the Asheville, N.C. Blues took both ends of a double header with the Montgomery, Ala. Dodgers at Keystone Field here Sunday afternoon. The scores in the Negro Southern baseball league contests were 24-0 and 22-0.”8

The Citizen provides line scores:

Johnson, Park and Vaughn; Flemming and Hatten.

Jalreath, Veall and Vaughn; Phillips and Banks.

The Blues were the home team, and the Citizen noted that the dual victories boosted their league record thus far in the season to 16-5.

The winning pitchers were Frank Flemming in the first game and Vernon Phillips in the second game. Flemming struck out 11 Dodgers and walked one. Phillips struck out seven and also allowed one base on balls. Phillips also homered in his game. In the opener, infielder Herman Taylor homered twice.

Clearly challenged as batters, the Dodgers, we can also see, were not that adept in the field, committing eight errors in the two games.

There is one Flemming (no first name indicated) found in the Seamheads database, pitching in one 1946 game for the Cleveland Buckeyes, credited with one-third of an inning and surrendering a walk and a base hit. There are several players named Phillips, but no Vernon Phillips and none that seem a likely candidate to be the Asheville pitcher in the second game.9

One does wonder how each team felt at day’s end – particularly the Montgomery players (both batters and pitchers), who had seen Asheville rack up 46 runs on 41 hits and eight Montgomery errors, while they failed to do more than earn two bases on balls.

The 1946 Blues certainly knew how to hit. There were two other games in which they scored 20 or more runs, and at least 16 games in which they scored 10 or more.10 In the days immediately preceding the double no-hit blowouts against Montgomery, they had beaten two South Carolina teams – the independent Greenville Black Spiders, 20-4, on June 6, and the Spartanburg Sluggers, 12-2, on June 8.

And they could pitch. Newspaper accounts are difficult to come by, but Plott reports that “In games for which a clear outcome could be determined the Blues pitchers were a combined 31-3 with two ties.” Flemming, he reports, was 7-0 in league play and Phillips was 5-0. Fellow pitcher Robert Bowman was 9-1 with three shutouts.11

Many league games were played in “neutral cities.” Asheville’s home park was McCormick Field. The two June 9 games were played at Keystone Field in Johnson City, Tennessee, on a Sunday. The manager for the Blues was C.L. Moore; the manager for Montgomery was Ernest “Spoon” Carter.

There was a series between Asheville and Montgomery from July 31 to August 3 resulting in scores of 13-6, 15-11, 15-6, 25-11, and 9-5.12

The 1946 team opened the season at home with 11-4 and 13-4 wins over Knoxville. The Blues appear to have compiled a 23-5 record in the first half of the season, and a 25-7 record in the second half, overall 48-12 (.800). They won every one of their final 16 league games.13

Asheville won the pennant, and then started the 1947 season with a 17-1 record.14 There is some uncertainty with where the teams stood at season’s end, with Asheville and the New Orleans Creoles battling it out for the league championship. “Whether or not the series was completed,” Plott writes, “is difficult to determine.”15 He notes that the Asheville Citizen claimed the Blues won three of five playoff games.

BILL NOWLIN regrets giving his season tickets to someone else on June 27, 2003. That was the day the Red Sox scored 14 runs in the bottom of the first inning (against the same Florida Marlins team that went on to win the World Series.) Johnny Damon already had two hits before any Sox player made an out; neither of the first two Marlins pitchers ever retired a batter. Ten runs scored before the first out. Final score, 25-8. It was a blowout – but not a big enough one to make this book. Bill lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and helps edit many books for SABR.

Notes

1 Email from Alan Cohen, March 22, 2019.

2 Email from Kevin Johnson, July 23, 2019.

3 “Stars Entertain Fans with Long Distance Hitting,” St. Louis Argus, September 14, 1928: 7. Thanks to Gary Ashwill for the clipping.

4 Email from Jim Overmyer, July 23, 2019.

5 Email from Bill Plott, July 24, 2019. Thanks to Bill for also supplying the Asheville Citizen newspaper story.

6 E-mail from Bill Plott, July 26, 2019.

7 For a history of the league, see William J. Plott, The Negro Southern League: A Baseball History, 1920-1951 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2015).

8 “Blues Shut Out Alabama Team Twice,” Asheville Citizen, June 10, 1946: 9.

9 None of the other names in the newspaper account appear to have been of players who made it to the Negro major leagues, with the possible exception of Asheville catcher Hatten – who is quite possibly Rufus Hatten, a catcher who appeared in four games for the Baltimore Elite Giants in 1946. Rufus Hatten also played for the 1942 Memphis Red Sox and 1944 Chicago American Giants, accumulating 20 known at-bats but without a base hit.

10 Plott, The Negro Southern League, 165.

11 Plott, 165.

12 Plott, 161.

13 Plott, 164.

14 Plott, 173.

15 Plott, 177.