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Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Black Sox Scandal Committee’s December 2023 newsletter. Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, center left, and American League president Ban Johnson, center right, seen here in 1911, were friends and business partners when they founded the AL together at the turn of the 20th century. Two decades […]

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, […]

Editor’s note: This article was first presented at the 2003 SABR convention and was republished in the June 2013 edition of SABR’s Black Sox Scandal Research Committee newsletter.   By Ralph J. Christian Most people’s visions of Iowa and its connection to the Black Sox Scandal have been shaped by the movie Field of Dreams. […]

Russell J. “Russ” Cowans was known in Detroit as the “Dean of Black Sportswriters.”1 In fact, during the 1920s and 1930s, he was that city’s only full-time Black sports reporter. The Detroit Tribune, the newspaper for which he wrote during that era, was located on St. Antoine Street, and because he was so knowledgeable about […]

James Elbert Greene, who went by the first name Joe, was one of the iconic catchers of the Negro Leagues. Greene was born on October 17, 1911, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. The 5-foot-11, 190-pound Greene was a durable and solid receiver who caught Satchel Paige and the balance of the elite pitching […]

Wendell Smith built a media career that would eventually be recognized in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He’s best known for his campaign to integrate major league baseball, which resulted in Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Wendell Smith, however, was more than an activist. During his 35-year career, he evolved […]

Two relief appearances for the 1950 Brooklyn Dodgers were the extent of left-handed pitcher Mal Mallette’s major-league career. An Air Force captain during World War II before entering professional baseball, he became an esteemed journalist after leaving the game. Malcolm Francis “Mal” Mallette was born on January 30, 1922, in Syracuse, New York, and grew […]

Skipper Roberts became the third man born in the state of Idaho to make the big leagues when he appeared in 26 games with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1913. The catcher suited up for 56 Federal League games the following summer with the Pittsburgh Rebels and Chicago Feds before a barroom fistfight finished his […]

Words cannot contain Mike Burke. A man of boundless courage and matchless charm, by the time he became president of the New York Yankees in 1966, he had already fought the Nazis with the French Resistance, tried to overthrow communist governments for the CIA, served as the model for a movie spy, and run the […]

Cliff Heathcote spent 14 of the 40 years of his life in the major leagues, and is largely remembered as half of one of the more memorable trades in baseball history; He was swapped for Max Flack between games of a 1922 doubleheader between the Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals. That sliver of  memory […]

As his nicknames, Speed Boy and Sparkplug,1 suggest, John Edward Reese was a fleet-footed outfielder who put together a 12-year career at the highest levels of professional baseball in the Negro Leagues. Although he spent most of his career as a reserve outfielder, he was talented enough to play in the outfield alongside some of […]

 “LaMarque was probably the most unassuming of all the Monarch players. … He didn’t stand out. And he liked it like that. Lefty quietly went about his business.”  – Ray Doswell, curator, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum1   Jim LaMarque, who like so many southpaws was nicknamed Lefty, said he almost quit in 1942, his first year […]

Silvio García was a shortstop and pitcher who played in Mexico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Canada, and his native Cuba, as well as the American Negro League and organized minor leagues, from 1931 to 1954. Known for his powerful right-handed line-drive swing and rifle arm, he won two batting championships in the Cuban […]

Perhaps the most emphatic action ever taken by the Commissioner of Baseball occurred on August 3, 1921. On that day, Kenesaw Mountain Landis banished eight Chicago White Sox players from Organized Baseball for life for throwing the 1919 World Series, despite their acquittal in a court trial. The expulsion edict quickly became a baseball landmark, […]

Effa Manley co-owned the Newark Eagles with her husband, Abe. In 2006 the Special Committee on Negro Leagues elected her to the National Baseball Hall of Fame for her work as a baseball executive. As of 2019, she was the only woman inducted into the Hall of Fame. On March 27, 1897, in Philadelphia, seamstress […]

Mike Mussina pitched consistently well over 18 big-league seasons for the Baltimore Orioles and New York Yankees, winning a total of 270 games and becoming the first American League pitcher to win 10 or more games in 17 consecutive seasons. With a varied arsenal of pitches including four-seam and two-seam fastballs, a slider, a changeup, […]

A dapper Bob Brown surveys his domain from the wooden steps of Athletic Park. The 5′ 9″ Brown was a dandy of sorts, wearing vests until the 1950s, long after they had gone out of style. (David Eskenazi Collection)   Bob Brown figured more money was to be made in baseball as an owner than […]

Jesse Houston had a very impressive debut season in 1937 with the Cincinnati Tigers of the Negro American League (NAL). It was also the debut season for the Cincinnati franchise in the NAL, and Houston helped it secure the second-best record by contributing at least nine wins, including a no-hitter that wasn’t widely reported and […]

The story is almost apocryphal, existing somewhere on that boundary between real and remembered. As it is most often told, a 10- (or perhaps 11-) year-old Art Pennington was on an afternoon fishing trip with his mother. As they began the trip home, one of the Essex’s balloon tires went flat. Art hopped out of […]

Eddie Boyd was a little-known player who had brief stints with the Detroit Stars and Chicago American Giants in 1920, the first year of the Negro National League’s existence. After his time with those two franchises, Boyd became a jack of all trades for the barnstorming Winnipeg Giants team that served as a developmental squad […]

The game appeared to be merely the first in a meaningless, end-of-the-season doubleheader between two teams that many weeks earlier had been eliminated from the 1954 pennant race. The sixth-place Washington Senators trailed the league-leading Cleveland Indians by 39 games and the Philadelphia Athletics were even further out of contention: 51½ games back. However, as […]

Salvatore Anthony Maglie came by his nickname, “Sal the Barber,” honestly. His fastball, delivered high and hard but with control, made him one of the most feared pitchers in the first half of the 1950s. Maglie had learned the art of intimidation from Dolf Luque, first for Cienfuegos in the Cuban Winter League in 1946, […]

On the morning of July 15, 1887, the New York Herald boldly titled one of its front-page stories, “THE COLOR LINE.” The story under the headline, from New Orleans, involved a claim by former Union Army “negro soldiers” that they were being denied admission into the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic, […]

After the Cincinnati Reds stunned the “baseball dope” in Game One of the 1919 World Series by knocking out Chicago ace Eddie Cicotte, rumors were flying about the White Sox’ uncharacteristically poor performance. The whispers would only grow louder after Game Two. Because baseball’s powers-that-be had voted on using an experimental best-of-nine format instead of […]