Search Results

The Zanesville (Ohio) Greys were a Class C minor-league baseball team affiliated with the Cleveland Indians. In 1935 Earl Wolgamot led the Greys to the best overall record in the eight-team Middle Atlantic League, and he was voted the league’s manager of the year for the second year in a row.1 His best players, though, […]

On a warm Saturday afternoon in May, with the nation’s list of war dead growing as the country battled in two theaters of war, the baseball fans of St Louis were given a rare treat. Big-league black baseball came to town and put on a show at Sportsman’s Park. The New York Black Yankees defeated […]

Introduction On Saturday, March 25, 1905, a small yet curious article appeared in the Salt Lake Telegram that announced a baseball game to be played the following day between the Salt Lake Browns and the Ogden Chocolates at Walker’s Field in Salt Lake City.1 This would be the first formally organized game of baseball between […]

“Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.” — Satchel Paige   Three decades before Don Larsen threw his perfect game in the ’56 World Series, a 22-year-old Negro League pitcher “down the Shore” beat his big-city counterpart to the postseason punch. Claude “Red” Grier joined […]

On September 19, 1988, the Pittsburgh Pirates paid tribute to the Homestead Grays by hoisting a black-and-white commemorative flag over Three Rivers Stadium. The occasion commemorated an event from 40 years earlier, when the Negro National League’s Grays defeated the Birmingham Black Barons, champions of the Negro American League, four games to one in the […]

Pepper pot. Bulldog. Firebrand. Scrapper. Solly Hemus answered to all those descriptions in 11 years as a major-league player and 2½ as a manager. Also: racist. Two future stars he disdained and disrespected, Bob Gibson and Curt Flood, branded him a bigot. “Hemus acted as if I smelled bad,” Flood wrote.1 “Solly was a hell-bent-for-leather, […]

It had been a few years; some New York Yankees fans might say it seemed like an eternity. But eight years after the Yankees participated in their last fall classic, they were back in the playoff hunt, as the calendar flipped to September 1972. They entered the final month of the season in third place, […]

“Buck Ewing was simply terrific.” — George Lippe1 William “Buck” Ewing had the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time at least twice during his otherwise itinerant Negro League career. He found himself on the Chicago American Giants in 1920 at the outset of his career as Rube Foster’s franchise […]

For a brief period in the mid-1920s, Nip Winters was the best southpaw not just in the Negro Leagues, but perhaps in all of professional baseball. Armed with a bracing curveball, the lanky lefty baffled batters for 11 seasons before fading into seeming obscurity. James Henry “Nip” Winters Jr. was born on April 29, 1899, […]

At six years of age, Russ Christopher was diagnosed with rheumatic fever. As a result, his heart became damaged. There was a small leak in one of his heart valves through which blood seeped, not allowing full circulation to his lungs. As a result, He was always out of breath. At times, when he overexerted […]

George Carey, who skipped around professional baseball like a well-thrown rock across a pond, spent four seasons in the major leagues during his professional baseball tenure. Traversing the country from Minneapolis to Memphis in the minor leagues, Carey bracketed his career from 1892 to 1911 — the inauguration years for basketball and the Indianapolis 500, […]

Given his achievements, Robert “Bobby” Marshall is one of the most underappreciated athletes of the 20th century. In 1903 Marshall became the first Black football player to play for the University of Minnesota. He also starred for the school’s baseball team and later became the first Black semipro hockey player in the nation’s history. After […]

It would not be inaccurate to call the 1929 Cubs team president William L. Veeck’s crowning achievement. Arguably baseball’s strongest franchise — even the Ruth/Gehrig New York Yankees could not have been rated higher at this juncture  — the Cubs had been built player by player over a decade by Veeck, with assistance from keen […]

One of a very few ballplayers to ever collect more than 4,000 hits in Organized Baseball, Arnold Statz collected 737 of those hits in his eight seasons in the major leagues and another 3,356 in his 18 seasons in the minors. His career saw him in the majors before he played minor-league ball. Only Pete […]

“The rumors are that [rookie] Allen is not returning with the Phillies to Connie Mack Stadium on Wednesday. He’s going directly to the Hall of Fame.”1   The Philadelphia Phillies’ first black superstar, Dick Allen was one of the most feared hitters in baseball in the 1960s. In an era dominated by pitching, he slugged […]

The first superstar in American League history, Napoleon Lajoie combined graceful, effortless fielding with powerful, fearsome hitting to become one of the greatest all-around players of the Deadball Era, and one of the best second basemen of all time. At 6’1″ and 200 pounds, Lajoie possessed an unusually large physique for his time, yet when […]

John Schorling (center in suit and bow tie) was Rube Foster’s business partner and the American Giants’ home field, Schorling Park, bore his name for several years (Photo: Chicago Defender, September 21, 1986)   An examination of John Schorling’s life yields more questions than answers. This is true of many individuals who lived in pre-internet […]

“Nobody’s a better second baseman than Dick.” – Satchel Paige, 19411 “Dick Seay was my idol. He and I used to talk a lot because I had a lot of confidence in him. I used to ask ’bout pointers playing second base, and he and I were very good friends. He really was a nice […]

The weather in Boston had been nothing short of miserable all week. It had arrived just in time to stifle weekend Independence Day festivities, and the heat and humidity enveloped the Hub like a blanket and sent citizens by the thousands clamoring for area beaches in search of relief. At nearby Camp Bedford, cavalry horses […]

Versatility can be both a blessing and a curse. Larry Kimbrough came to the Negro Leagues with the reputation of being both a switch-hitter and a switch-pitcher. Early in his career he faced the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Stars in an exhibition game and held them to two hits until the fourth inning, when they exploded for […]

Ferguson Arthur Jenkins, Jr. was a dominant right-handed pitcher known for strikeouts, eleventh (through 2013) on the all-time leader list with 3,192. He is the only pitcher to have more than 3,000 strikeouts with less than 1,000 walks (997). While he pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies, Texas Rangers and Boston Red Sox, he is best […]

In a column for the St. Louis Star in 1910, sportswriter Billy Murphy proclaimed, “We’re going to put you wise to the fact that the fastest man who ever played baseball lives in this city. ’Tis John Magner, who played with the Browns in the early ’80s. Magner was not speedy – he was lightning.”1 […]

This article appears in SABR’s “Bittersweet Goodbye: The Black Barons, the Grays, and the 1948 Negro League World Series” (2017), edited by Frederick C. Bush and Bill Nowlin.   To people familiar with the historical relationship between the cities of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Birmingham, Alabama, it must seem appropriate that the last Negro League World […]